A Free CoSleeping Webinar & A Giveaway

Cosleeping is a very natural thing for humans to do since well, forever. It is very instinctual in us because if you left a baby or small child alone at night in the wild, they would be eaten. It is safer to sleep with your children and be able to easily take care and protect them. All cultures all over the world outside of modern day western society safely cosleep with their children. It also helps children and parents reconnect and bond – especially if the parents have been away at work all day, it’s nice to reconnect even if you are sleeping. Cosleeping helps to allay children’s fears at night, it’s easy to nurse or bottle feed them, and everyone I know that cosleeps gets to sleep more because they don’t have to get up and walk over to the kid’s bedrooms to feed or comfort their children – they are right there and are able to respond right away to their children’s cries (this is also called “nighttime parenting“). And we all know that a well-rested mama is a happy and nicer mama to her whole family.

Also, some children still want to sleep near their parents as they get a bit older. There is so much change happening in their world with rapid growth into toddlerhood, then becoming a preschooler and all that they are experiencing everyday it sometimes is a lot for them to take in and being near their parents is safe and comforting for them. This is the case with our son, who is an only child. Sometimes siblings like to cosleep with each other, too.

We added a twin bed to our bedroom and Leif sleeps in that. Everyone has space and sleeps well and Leif feels safe and secure. We don’t feel the need to force him out when he’s not ready because he truly is afraid whenever we have talked about it and we don’t mind, we love the bonding experience we still get to have with him. One day soon, he’ll want to move out of our room then only want to play with his friends and not us, etc. Early childhood is a very special time and it goes by entirely too fast!

I hope you will join in the webinar and learn more about the truth regarding safe cosleeping practices from the experts. See below for the details about this free webinar:

Join Mothering, James McKenna, Dr. Paul Fleiss and the founders of Attachment Parenting International for an exclusive webinar on cosleeping sponsored by Arms Reach (www.armsreach.com) on Friday, August 22, at 11am Pacific. Registration is free at https://www2.gotomeeting.com/island/webinar/registration.tmpl?id=721965936.

James McKenna is among the country’s leading experts in cosleeping safety. He is a researcher and the director of the Mother-Baby Behavioral Sleep Lab at the University of Notre Dame. Dr. Paul Fleiss is a pediatrician and the author of Sweet Dreams: A Pediatrician’s Secrets for Baby’s Good Night Sleep, as well as numerous scientific articles published in leading national and international medical journals. Barbara Nicholson and Lysa Parker, Attachment Parenting International cofounders, will share their attachment parenting expertise.

Learn why cosleeping is both a natural and an effective way to foster a safe, nurturing environment for babies. Leading experts in the field will present their latest research and host a question and answer session.

On another note, don’t forget to check out Heather from A Mama’s Blog giveaway for 2 BPA-free Camelback water bottles!

photo © Nature Deva

New Changes At Attachment Parenting International

We consider ourselves to be an AP family. We both read a book by Dr. Sears called The Attachment Parenting Book when I was pregnant with our son and it really resonated with us. We both felt that this was the intuitive way to parent, the way it was meant to be. It just feels right and it is respectful and loving to the child. We find that the benefits are really worth the effort.

Our son, now 4, is very social, kind and independent. He feels secure in going out and experiencing new situations with making new friends and he has so much compassion for others.  He’s really tuned in to the needs of his peers.  He is generally a very happy, imaginative, fun guy.  He is, however, a very sensitive type of personality and was a high-needs baby and I feel that if we didn’t follow the 8 principles of AP as best we could, he would have turned out very differently.

The high touch and responsiveness of this philosophy is really very beneficial especially for a high needs child.  I highly recommend this type of parenting philosophy for any aged child.

Attachment Parenting International (API), a non-profit organization that promotes parenting practices that create strong, healthy emotional bonds between children and their parents, has several exciting changes they would like to announce, including:

• A newly redesigned web site and new logo at Attachment Parenting.org;
• Attachment parenting worldwide support forums;
• Parent Education Program – a comprehensive series of classes for every stage and age of child development from infancy through adulthood;
• A new book based on API’s Eight Principles of Attachment Parenting by API co-founders Lysa Parker and Barbara Nicholson which is expected to be available this summer;
• A series of podcasts, webinars, chats, and forums with API Advisory Board members and other supporters of AP. Future events are scheduled with Dr. Bob Sears, Dr. James McKenna, and Kathleen Kendall Tacket. Check out the events page for more information.

These are just a few of many exciting things going on at API. I hope you’ll stop by and check it out for yourself.

What A Woman Can Do

I keep meaning to mention this.  I met a woman at Michael’s xmas office party that was telling me a story about her grandmother.  The woman had 22 children, all normal births, I believe.  But, the really fascinating thing about that (like 22 pregnancies, labors and births is not fascinating enough), out of the 22 kids, there were TWO sets of triplets and THREE sets of twins!!!  Almost half of her children were multiples!!  No fertility drugs whatsoever, these multiples were all natural and vaginally birthed!

Now, I could not help but ask her, after her first set of triplets, wouldn’t you want to not have any more children? I mean, you would think it would be very taxing on your body to carry 3 people in there.  I guess that made having a  single baby a piece of cake!  I could not imagine taking care of 2 or three infants at one time and dealing with the older kids, too and being pregnant!  I asked if she had help and she said no, just when the older kids got old enough to help her raise the younger ones.  She was married to the same man for all the kids.  I swear, I would have asked him to get fixed or never have sex again.  I honestly can’t imagine that many pregnancies and births and dealing with infants and toddlers and all the stuff you have to deal with.  You would think she would have figured out her cycle to avoid pregnancy and wouldn’t she be so tired anyway from dealing with all of those kids to keep procreating??!!

How can they afford 22 children, anyway? Where would they all sleep??  How did anyone get enough (or any) attention from mom? I had so many questions for her, I didn’t want to ask too many at once but she could tell I was fascinated by the story!

I did ask if her belly and boobs were hanging down to the ground from being stretched out so many times and she said actually, she’s a pretty small person all over.  I think she said she was 4′11″!!!  That is truly amazing!  She told me she went to a family reunion recently and she has like 200 first cousins, some she just met for the first time!

I guess some women are cut out to do this in their lifetimes.  Clearly, I’m not one of them   It is truly amazing to me what the female body is capable of doing.

Belly Dancing and Birth

As some of you may have read in other posts of mine, I love to dance.  I especially love belly dancing and did it for many years before I became pregnant.  There is just something so ancient and primal and very feminine about the movements and skills you develop with your body in performing this dance.

I love when synchronicities happen because I came across this website, The Goddess Dancing, and it has a few articles about  belly dancing and birth and their similarities.  I find this fascinating because I have been specifically trying to do this dance again to help my pelvic bones shift so that I may get pregnant one more time and have a natural birth like I want.

From my first birth experience I was told by my OB (and it was confirmed by my massage therapist) that my pelvis is sort of “funnel-shaped” meaning that the bones are not far enough apart to push a baby out and my baby could not drop down at all during labor (i.e. – we would have died without a c-section).  I want to change that and belly dancing seems to be the only real way to do it.

This one article on that site, The Dance of Birth,  was written by Anita-Cristina Calcaterra in 1992 and the first line reads, “It is important for women to reclaim birth as a natural and powerful process”.   It says that a dancer named Morocco in 1965 compared childbirth classes taught at a NY hospital and the Natural Childbirth book by Dr.  Frederick W. Goodrich to her dance movements as she performed them.

Other birth instructors in the 70’s compared the similarities in the muscle isolation of this dance with Lamaze and other dancers showed how the movements of this dance help in “moving the baby down” the birth canal.

Wendy Buonaventura published a book in ‘83 called Belly Dancing, where she outlined the role of the dance throughout history in many cultures.  She showed that the dance has always been a part of the birth process.

Another great article on this subject, In the Belly of the Goddess: Belly Dance and Birth, written by Cathy Moore, a certified nurse-midwife  goes into more detail and comparisons on this subject.  It does mention that in middle eastern cultures even today, the laboring woman will have other women (and even men) doing belly dance moves around her to remind her to do these movements to help her labor and stop the pain and to move the baby down.  I would totally LOVE that!!  A group of friends and relatives dancing to drum music and helping me bring my baby into the world with that kind of rhythm and vibe going on around us.  How cool is that??

I think it really is a shame that we are so far away from that kind of primal, movement filled type of labor in present times.  We need to incorporate more of this into our modern birthing ways, even for home births and especially for the hospital births.

I feel the Goddess energy move through me when I belly dance and I especially felt it when I was pregnant.  It is so powerful.  How wise that women combined it since ancient times to assist them in a gentle, powerful birth.