Raw30: Day 24

The crackers came out fantastic! I enjoyed having them... when I finally could. Today we had a regional meeting for Pet Trainers, so I had to be somewhere at 8am. What, that's not so bad? It is when you've been up nursing a baby all night!

Baby Beast had a bad night, waking me up throughout to nurse for a minute or two, just long enough to feel 'better' and doze back off (thank god we co-sleep; if i was having to go to another room for this, i wouldn't take it nearly so amicably). I think it was the small amount of dairy I had a couple days ago. While he doesn't seem to be having a full-blown reaction, he has been just a little more clingy... but then again, that might just be having me be at work for four hours.

Regardless, we had a night of poor sleep, then I had to be up and getting ready at 6:45am, a full hour before Baby Beast and I normally roll out of the family bed.

And then the clothes dryer broke. THE HITS, THEY JUST KEEP ON COMIN'!

So today was spent running from one side of the city to the other and back again, trying to accomplish all the things that needed to be accomplished.

At least I had some nummy crackers to take with me. And I ended up with three baggies full, so I might have them for several days! Now I just need to make some raw nut cheese to put on them...

Raw30: Day 23

Today was too busy to accomplish much, but I did get the Vegetable Flax Crackers mixed and into the dehydrator, and according to their schedule of readiness, we ought to be able to dig in sometime tomorrow morning.

Otherwise, I spent the day in a huff trying to deal with a lot of inner emotional turmoil. Everything that caused the huff has been cleared up, and I feel much better now... but I have a really early morning tomorrow (roughly two hours earlier than the Baby Beast and I usually rise) so I'm not even going to bother trying to do more than say, "Look, y'all, the crackers are dehydrating!"


Waiting to be broken into cracker-sized pieces tomorrow

Raw30: Day 20

I was called into work today - suprise! - to be introduced to the students I will soon be taking over, to meet&greet both them and their dogs. I agreed readily, and then Oklahoma got a surprise 6" of snow dumped on it (on the first day of spring. it is to laugh).

So I drove the 25min drive from my home to PetSmart with white-knuckles and enough adrenaline running through my veins that I probably could have jogged there, 28-degree weather and blowing snow be damned. Especially when an idiot in a pick-up truck whipped out of his lane and into my lane just ahead of me, fishtailed, smashed out one of his rear lights, fishtailed some more, and then continued forward. Oklahoma drivers, for the most part, get their licenses out of gumball machines.

Of course, the snowstorm caused everyone to huddle in their homes and refuse to come out, so PetSmart wound up having to cancel the training classes scheduled for today. So, instead of meet&greet, I did new hire paperwork and made up a schedule for training classes for the next three months.

As for food, I started off with a smoothie, but after freezing my tuchus off in blasting wind and ice, I microwaved another vegan meal and shared it with the Baby Beast. Then we took a nap, dozing off while nursing. Aaah, bliss. Warm baby body is the best way to feel better after being cold outside.

For dinner tonight, GrandmaBeast dived in and made a salad (to go along with the short-grain brown rice, pan-seared salmon, green beans, black-eyed peas, and beets i made). It was a wonderful dinner, the Baby Beast ate a taste of everything, and the world is a good place to be. And I had double-helpings of the salad, because it was delicious.

Raw30: Day 15

How embarrassing... I was so tired last night, I went in to nurse the Baby Beast back down and ended up passing out next to him. So the blog post I was going to write up last night is now being written up this morning. In my defense, yesterday was one HECK of a long day!

I indulge myself to one massage a month. With Lupus, it's a very good way to help with the pain... but this month I felt like I deserved something for being a MommyBeast for nearly a year (the Baby Beast's birthday will be April 1st, for anyone interested), so yesterday I had my first of two massages this month. I'm such a lucky gal.

Unfortunately, that massage was at 10am. So I got up with the Baby Beast and threw myself into the shower (no one wants to give a massage to a stinky person) and took care of my normal morning activities before I had to drive the 20 minutes to the Massage Envy I go to (in Oklahoma, driving 20-30min to get somewhere is considered normal). Then I had to hurry home to get ready for the surprise job interview for the job I didn't apply for at the store I didn't apply to.

What? Huh? Wait a second...

Before the Baby Beast, I was a dog trainer (I still technically am; I just consider him the bigger part of my life). I was a dog trainer for two years with PetSmart, which gave me a chance to use all the dog information I had spent years acquiring to help other people with their canine issues.

I was - and am - a darn good dog trainer. My clients loved me. Their dogs loved me. I had a lot of repeat business (i.e. someone would take a Puppy or Beginner class with me, and then choose to go on to the Intermediate class with me).

So, when one of the local PetSmarts lost their trainer (she walked out in the middle of a semester of classes, leaving a lot of people hanging), the first person on the Area Pet Trainer's mind was me.

I got a call on Friday from Lynne, the Area Pet Trainer, detailing a little of what was going on. After talking to her on Saturday, I knew this would work out well; I'd been wanting to do a little work outside the home - no more than 20hr a week - and this job was coming at the perfect time for that.

Long story short, I had an interview yesterday for the job and it seems like I'll be diving back in to Pet Training in a week or so.

By the time I'd finished the interview, taken the required drug test, and run down to Norman to pick up some dates, it was pushing 4pm and I was exhausted from rushing around all day.

So you'll have to excuse me if the only thing I made was more Fudge Balls. And even then, I didn't ball them up very well. The stuff is the consistency of thick brownie batter, and just as sticky... so the balls don't ball well. It's much easier to eat it right out of the food processor with a couple spoons.

Let's talk 'Babytalk'

I am what can commonly be referred to as a "geek." I read. A LOT. So if someone tells me that the letter Q is actually the letter B, I'm going to research it until I can either prove or disprove them.

Because I, as a mother of a nearly-11-month-old infant and also the official Laundry Manager and Chef of the house (and 'mommy' to four small dogs), can manage to research things, I think that it's not too much to ask that magazines, who are claiming to have some know-how, should have to do research, too.

Now, I'm not 100% opposed to Babytalk Magazine. They DO promote breastfeeding. But for the most part, Babytalk Magazine is (a free magazine that is) mainly a vehicle for advertising a lot of unnecessary baby gimmicks.

Recently, they published two articles that bothered me (both were published in the March 2010 issue).

In their first article, "Cravings," under the Bedtime Browsing category, they say that bed-sharing actually increases the risk of SIDS. Okay, look... that is just patently ridiculous. It has been proven through multiple* studies that mother-infant bed-sharing actually DECREASES the risk of SIDS. Most deaths caused by co-sleeping are, in fact, caused by adult mistake and not by Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (an unexplained sudden loss of life). If you research safe co-sleeping (which I recommend), then the chances of you rolling onto your infant are very, very low. If you're STILL worried about it, set up a side-car situation with a co-sleeper or a crib, so the baby can still benefit from having his mommy right next to him throughout the night, responding to his cues to nurse.

Their second article, though, has raised a lot of hackles. The Woman from "Woman, Uncensored" has a whole blog post about it, and I definitely recommend you check it out: Dear Babytalk

It's bad enough that they recommend manipulating and infant's foreskin in ANY fashion (which is a huge no-no; would you want someone pulling up your fingernail to clean underneath it? of course not! this is no different), but Babytalk wasn't even truly apologetic for their misinformation. This was the best they managed.

Let it be known right here, right now that the foreskin of an infant IS NOT TO BE MANIPULATED IN ANY FASHION. Not by you, not by your pediatrician, not be a pediatric nurse, not by your midwife. It is attached to the glans (head of the penis) for a REASON, and it will separate on its own schedule when it is ready to do so (usually somewhere between the 5th year of life and the teen years).

Yes, Babytalk is a free magazine, but they should still do at least basic research (Google is your friend) before publishing articles that scream "SIDS!" and "RETRACTION!" to people who may not double-check everything as obsessively as I do.

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* Here are just a few pro-bed-sharing studies:
J.J. McKenna et al., "Sleep and arousal patterns of co-sleeping human mother/infant pairs: a preliminary physiological study with implications for the study of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS)," Am J Phys Anthropol 83, no. 3 (Nov 1990): 331-47.
S. Mosko et al., "Infant arousals during mother-infant bed sharing: implications for infant sleep and sudden infant death syndrome research," Pediatrics 100, no. 5 (Nov 1997): 841-9.
S. Mosko et al., "Maternal sleep and arousals during bedsharing with infants," Sleep 20, no 2 (Feb 1997): 142-50.
S. Farouqi et al., "Ethnic differences in infant-rearing practices and their possible relationship to the incidence of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS)," Paediatr Perinat Epidemiol (England) 7, no. 3 (Jul 1993): 245-52.
N. Watanabe et al., "Epidemiology of sudden infant death syndrome in Japan," Acta Paediat Jpn (Japan) 36, no. 3 (June 1994): 329-32.