Organic Mutant

we’ll soon be celebrating the little one’s 21st month. overall things have gone swimmingly as each day he grows into a determined, independant individual. i feel pretty passionate about him in a way that grows with each new development. his whims are my entertainment and i feel so lucky that i love shopping for toys, scoping out new ways to make his life interesting, and ensuring that i meet his developmental needs to the best of my abilities.

the one thing about parenting is that there are as many ways to do it as there are parents. think about that. i know that lots of people have made millions of dollars convincing you that there is one way, one tried and true formula that will help you raise a happy, content, controllable child. there is whole spectrum that opens up before you when you find out you are expecting a child. from ferber to attachment parenting, so many ways to raise a child open before you and it’s pretty daunting if you don’t know what you want.

of course there are some things that should be avoided all costs - abuse is pretty well defined, but there are lots of things that are not well delineated.

wade and i followed our own path. lucas has a crib, but he has slept with us for the most part. now, when he’s tired he goes to bed by himself. sometimes he’ll be cranky and i’ll tell him ‘hey, just go to bed and rest. you’ll feel better.’ then he’ll toddle off and the house will get very quiet. when i go to check on him, i find him sprawled on the bed in a deep sleep. while he is transitioning to his crib, yet he loves to fall asleep in mama and papa’s bed. when we go to bed, we simply pick him up and put him in his little crib.

we breast fed and still do this day. it was hard work at first, but he loves his boob juice. it’s something that works for us and after reading the continuum concept, i decided to keep it going til he’s about two or when he’s ready to give it up. it’s been challenging & sometimes people give us a look that says ‘are you crazy?’, but hey, people, boobs are for nursing babies, not selling beer. he eats really well and thanks to the super baby food book we have had little worry about his weight or his nutrition. he starts every morning with a big smoothie, filled with milk, nuts, fruit, flax seeds & whatever we have around and then we let him feed himself the rest of the day.

we also have used cloth diapers since he was three months old. (we went back to disposable for a few months once we started the bathroom remodel, but now we’ve returned to the cloth horse.) not adding more to our contribution to the landfill was our initial motivation, but once we started it seemed very natural. there is of course some debate about the use of cloth diapers in arid locales like san diego, but since there is a great amount of water consumption in the manufacturing of disposable diapers, we decided it was a wash. when we do use disposables we use unbleached diapers that do not release free-chlorine into the environment which can result in dioxin pollution. using cloth diapers has also catapulted me into the world of composting — more on that later.

since we adopted more of the attachment parenting paradigm, we also chose to use baby carriers as an alternative to the use of the stroller (now we do use the stroller on occasion, but didn’t use it for the first six months). we loved the moby wrap, which i read about randomly on some livejournal community. the best part was that wade used it a lot to carry lucas around & it gave him a chance to be close to lucas in way that kept his hands free. sometimes wade would be working on his book with lucas in the moby wrap and i would be free - free as a bird. however once lucas reached 12 months the moby wrap became unwieldly.

in maui i saw a woman in the airport with an ergo baby carrier, which you can switch from front to back in a matter of moments. we bought one and started using it right away. it is a wonderful tool. a few weeks ago, schmokie was in a terrible state. his long fur causes irritation on his back in the summer months and we’ve been shaving him (he looks like a little lion!) to prevent his suffering. i needed to take care of him & the groomer did a less than adequate job last time, so guess who was gonna do it? the unfortunate thing is that shaving him at home is awful - hair gets everywhere & there is so much of it. there is, however, a dog wash in OB. so one friday morning i took lucas and schmokie and headed west. now how could i, one person with only two hands, manage to wash & shave schmokie while watching lucas? the ergo baby carrier! i popped lucas in the carrier and in less than half of an hour - voila!- one chore off the mighty chore list. of course, i have used it when cleaning the house, gardening, hiking, etc. & with nary a complaint from my passenger.

again, this is merely stuff that has worked for us. i personally endorse these methods because they felt right *to me*. we used these ideas as a starting point because both wade & i felt that they made sense *to us*. there are things we could improve upon, but those are personal & not so much about tools unlike above. there can be a lot of pressure to conform to someone else’s notion of the right way to parent, so follow your heart when and if you choose to become a parent. anyways that’s my two cents for now.