Toxins found in pregnant U.S. women

I suppose I shouldn’t find this surprising, especially after watching Gasland, but still, it’s very disturbing.

perhaps solids should come earlier than six months?

New research from Britain recommends that introducing solids before six months might benefit breastfed babies.

I particularly like this comment left on the article:

“I am so tired of hearing health professionals, midwives and health visitors pontificate as to what is best for babies. Every baby is different and every situation is different. I started weaning my two children as soon as they showed an interest in reaching out for solid food. Both wanted solids at 4.5 months old and started on baby rice. Perhaps we should stop listening to blanket guidelines (which cannot possibly be completely correct since they are changed every five minutes) and listen to our babies instead!”

My mother insisted that River needed some cereal earlier to fill him up. Not only was he large and ravenous, but I had trouble producing enough supply to fill him up. I think I acquiesced somewhere around four months. He was interested and perfectly happy with his cereal. We moved quickly into other foods and I gave him some cow’s milk around 10 or 11 months because it was cheaper than formula and I figured he was getting a good supply of vitamins from the wide variety of food he was eating.

Forcing a baby to wait until six months, regardless of the individual baby’s development and circumstances, didn’t make much sense to me. Blanket guidelines serve a purpose by providing general recommendations. But as the commenter points out, probably the best source of information about what is right is the baby itself.

Even good schools in the U.S. may not be so good compared to world standards

An important article in the Atlantic this month, one I passed along to
my husband as I try to advocate putting our son into an international baccalaureate (IB)-based program. He says our local public schools are good, which is true. They are good by U.S. standards. But they aren’t so great, especially in math, science and foreign languages, by world standards.

An intriguing excerpt reads:

“How would our states do if we looked just at the white kids performing at high levels—kids who are not, generally speaking, subject to language barriers or racial discrimination? Or if we looked just at kids with at least one college-educated parent?

As it turned out, even these relatively privileged students do not compete favorably with average students in other well-off countries. On a percentage basis, New York state has fewer high performers among white kids than Poland has among kids overall. In Illinois, the percentage of kids with a college-educated parent who are highly
skilled at math is lower than the percentage of such kids among all students in Iceland, France, Estonia, and Sweden.

Parents in Palo Alto will always insist that their kids are the exception, of course. And researchers cannot compare small cities and towns around the globe—not yet, anyway. But Hanushek thinks the study significantly undercuts the diversity excuse. “People will find it quite shocking,” he says, “that even our most-advantaged students are not all that competitive.”

One recourse would be to adopt IB or programs of similar quality standards in the local public schools. But according to the article, only Massachusetts has yet done this with any real effect, and even that state still has a way to go.

Does being a mom make you smarter?

As much as I want to like this result, and as much as I think
it could possibly be valid once the newborn sleep deprivation has worn
off, I am not feeling it now. In addition to struggling with frequent
lightheadedness (which only seems to appear at work), I’m having a
heck of a time concentrating. I am managing some analytical things –
I’m doing OK in my statistics class and just passed a difficult exam
at work. But I have to work on these things in small chunks over many
days. What I actually accomplish in an eight or ten hour period feels
pretty minimal.

I also wonder how the effects differ for moms who dedicate themselves
full-time to parenthood and those who don’t. For me, I find that
being out of the loop, away from colleagues, away from daily adult
interactions and away from exposure to new tasks and concepts that
challenge me limits the range of topics I know about and definitely
makes me feel less smart. I know it’s not really a question of
intelligence, but of intelligence being exercised. Without exercise,
I lose it. At least temporarily.

Maybe in a few months I’ll feel smarter. That will be something to
look forward to.

Now pregnant women are responsible for the obesity epidemic too?

This article bugs me. I have no research to refute it with, nor have I read the studies to see how well they were done. But I have an instinctual aversion to it. It feels to me like the easy way out – when you can’t find the cause of a problem, try blaming pregnant women.

Some questions I have:
1. Why is family baby weight history not mentioned? I was over 8 pounds at birth and I imagine my husband was too. I’d guess my father was too. So even if my mom gained less weight than I did, large babies run in our family because we are big people. My 8 pound 10 ounce baby was just what I expected, regardless of my weight gain.

2. My doctor in Bolivia predicted at 10 weeks, based on the growth to that point, that I’d have a four kilo baby. He was right. At that time, I don’t think I’d gained any weight at all. I ended up gaining about 60 pounds. But the baby was still 4 kilos.

3. I’m an outlier on the tall side when it comes to height for women. My husband is on the tall side of men. So it’s natural that we would expect to have a larger than average offspring. I don’t expect I would gain the same amount of weight as a smaller person expecting a smaller offspring.

4. I know several women who gained 50-60 pounds, who delivered healthy, large babies, who eat well and exercise, and whose children have grown into healthy and not overweight toddlers and young boys/girls. These women have lost the excess weight post-baby. What is the point of making women like this stress out when they are already suffering and worrying enough during the travails of pregnancy?

5. Is there a correlation between women who gain an excess amount of weight during pregnancy and women who make poor nutritional choices for their children? Perhaps it’s the latter part that is the greater concern.

I may be a little defensive on this subject, given my 60 pound weight gain last time around. But I started out about 10 pounds under my normal weight and I eventually lost 50 of those 60. Since I started out underweight, I pretty much returned to normal. So far I’ve gained 18 pounds this time around, with 16 weeks to go. I suppose if I really watched what I was eating, perhaps I could stay within the 25-35 pound weight gain. But I tend to put on the weight in the latter half of the pregnancy, so I expect I’ll go beyond that. And I don’t really feel like stressing out about it when I eat a lot of healthy food (in addition to some sweets), exercise, and am in the process of creating and nourishing a healthy baby.

Thanks to his 8 pounds and 10 ounces, River survived my milk taking a week to come in and the pound he lost didn’t affect him much. Yes, he was a chunk around a year of age, but he lost the fat when he started moving and is now a slender toddler. He eats vegetables and sushi, fruits, yogurt and whole grains. I let him have occasional sweets, but very little in the way of processed foods and refined grains.

Childhood obesity is an issue that concerns me and I take active steps to ensure my child is well nourished and gets exercise. But I’m not going to take the blame for what I eat during pregnancy. Give me a break.

What do you think?

More toxic stuff

Lead in juice boxes and canned fruit:

Luckily, I’ve never bought River juice, so I don’t have to worry too much about this one. Hopefully, the very occasional canned fruit and/or juice box he has received outside the home are infrequent enough to not worry about either. I really don’t need anything else to stress about right now.

More evidence of the benefits of sleep

One of the things I found hardest to adjust to in Spain was the different sleep schedule, especially the late and erratic hours kept by children. I can see the benefits – more family time, easier to go out, etc. But the kids did seem cranky. Mark and I joked about whether or not we should tell them that sleeping more would help their children’s brain development. We figured they probably wouldn’t appreciate it.

There has been a lot of evidence coming out lately on the benefits of sleep, and here is one more. Most notably, having a rule about bedtime was associated with 6-7% higher math and language skills among preschoolers. In Spain, we saw kids negotiate with their parents about bedtime. We asked some friends if their child did that regularly and they said it happened every night and could last an hour. Neither Mark nor I wanted to spend an hour of our days in painful fighting about bedtime.

So I guess we’ll be sticking with our 8-8:30 p.m. bedtime for our toddler, even if he does occasionally babble in his crib until 10. And no negotiations, except in exceptional circumstances. So far, he’s cool with the bedtime ritual. Since he enjoys each part of it, it’s generally not difficult to go from one step to the next. But he has begun to negotiate in other areas. Should he try applying that to bedtime, we will have to remember what is good for him and stick to our schedule. Looking back, I would have been much better off with more sleep from about ages 13 to23.

I’m trying to decide on the hours we’ll take him to preschool in the fall. Part of me wanted to make it 8 a.m., to maximum the time he has there in the morning. But he doesn’t usually get up until 8 and I see no reason at this point in his life to wake him before his body is ready. I’ll see what time he’s waking up in August and then set a start-time that allows us to get him up and ready with minimal rush and to get to work at a reasonable time (perhaps 8:30 or 9).

It's so nice when something that is good for the child is also good for the parent (quiet time - yay!).

Research overload

I’m tired. My brain is tired. Today only, I had to wonder about when
to take the little one to the dentist, whether I made the right
decision to get the H1N1. I wondered why I felt so sluggish and down.
Besides the fact that I feel conflicted between the helpful advice I
get from parent groups and this yucky feeling of spending my time
debating with people who are way too into their kids, I realized that
I spend a heck of a lot of time looking stuff up, as I imagine the
other parents who ask these questions or enter these debates do too.

Which diaper is best? Which bottle is safe? What are the hazards of a
used crib or carseat and do they outweigh the cost savings? Which
vaccines to get and when? How long to breastfeed? How to handle
discipline? What type of development to expect at which stage? When
to go to preschool? What kind of preschool?

Whew. I’m tired. I do wish for some kind of expert panel I could
trust that would let me know what they recommend and that I could
follow wholeheartedly. Of course, I’m interested in finding out the
answers to these questions so that I can make the best decisions for
my son. But is this really the best way to spend my time? Maybe I’d
do better putting in those hours doing better at work, so that I could
better provide for him.

I also don’t like the feeling, though I admit it might be self-inflicted, of having to defend a decision one takes. Not only do I have to research, I have to explain my decision and read why others might have chosen otherwise, which leads me back into either more
research or self doubt.

I know what I probably need to do is turn it off. Stop subscribing to
the parent groups, stop reading the blogs, stop getting into dialogues with people on these topics. Tim Ferriss recommends severely limiting media intake – something that I think would probably reduce my stress level greatly, as well as perhaps my knowledge of current events.

Why don’t I do it? Unfortunately, I have a penchant for finding out
facts. I like to understand situations, to make decisions based on
data. I also like and appreciate that rare little nugget that comes
through during the discussions – a good place for a hair cut for
example or a special event or discount.

Another factor is that I find it harder to concentrate than I did
before. When I need a quick break from whatever I’m focusing on
(which seems to be every 5-10 minutes) I take a look at the email.

Anyone have any advice on how to cut down or cut back and still stay
relatively informed? I sometimes feel like I hear these internet
debates in my head. I’d like to fill that space with something more
substantial or less stressful.