Making Big Progress!

It’s been so hard to blog lately because the baby is still a light sleeper and when he is napping I try to do stuff like eating or doing some journal writing. I’ve been working out some weird anxiety since Rainer’s birth, but I feel like I’m almost out of it now, feeling rather sunny comparatively! The lovely patch of Spring weather we’ve had for the last 10 days or so is definitely helping.

Another thing that is helping is that Elias has made huge strides in his expressive and receptive skills in the last couple of weeks. I have been meaning to go back to my last entry and add a link to http://www.cherab.org/ for anyone who wants a great starting point to learn about childhood communication disorders. The Late Talker was an invaluable book for us when we first suspected that Elias had a delay and helped us to determine if we thought he needed early intervention or if we were safely in the “wait and see” camp. It turns out we were probably MOSTLY in the “wait and see” camp but sought services anyway and dropped services when we realized that his issues were not going to be using sounds but more receptive in nature. It’s confusing, and every child is so different, I don’t want to be misleading like “Hey, just wait it out” just because that is what happened in our case. Elias was not ready to communicate with speech until he was 3, and I feel like nothing could have changed that.

As far as progress, I’m amazed by how huge a leap he can make in a few DAYS. His receptive skills just jumped up to about average, I can now just say “Hey Elias, can you go get me a diaper for Rainer?” and he runs in the house and gets it for me. Very useful, LOL!  He can even do a two step direction like “Can you put your bowl in the sink and bring me your cup?” which my 10 year old STILL struggles with (or chooses to ignore, ha)! Elias can answer the question “What did you do at school today?” with things like “Played with cars,” and he makes up stories all of a sudden. Yesterday, his first grand story of all time, really, with details like “I’m a fairy swan, in February! This is my egg and my castle!” Stuff like that is just amazing after waiting so long to hear what is going on in his head.

This afternoon we took a bath  together and I was asking him questions like “How many brothers do you have, what are their names?” and he struggled with the complexity of that but did come out with “Baby brother Rainer?”

I got his first report card on Friday. It’s basically just an update on how we’re progressing with his goals that we set at the ARD meeting when he started. The marks said “Age Appropriate” in every box except language, which said that he is doing really well and making more and more progress in that regard. I cried for real when I read it, our kid is an average kid! Wooohooo! He is strong in math and phonics, but struggles a little with sitting still and listening. This describes my ten year old, as well as my own damn self!

When I was in elementary school my report card said (each year from 1st grade on) “Struggles to stay focused, works below potential.” This is the same thing that my son’s reports always say and we’re working on it but whew, school can be so boring. It really can. Who wants to sit still and learn about the Civil War when your ten? You want to go out in the yard and re-enact it with sticks and rocks, right? I totally get it, and I wish we could give children a better and more fulfilling education.

Speaking of fulfilling education, have you heard of http://www.khanacademy.org/ ? What an amazing resource. I wish I was smart enough about anything to contribute. If you have a special skill, or want to learn one, give it a shot and let me know how you like it.

Something else I’ve been really fixated on is the amazing http://www.griffinschool.org/academics.php which I drive by all the time and marvel at. It’s inside an old ex-church in a great little neighborhood a couple miles from us. It’s my dream to have Owen go there if we stay in Austin that long. WOW, so cool.

I intended this to be more eloquent and thoughtful but with the distractions around me I feel like the best I can do is say “Ya, my kid is gonna be okay.” And that feels pretty amazing.

Ch Ch Changes

This feels like a really important blog to write because as a parent who has searched the internet for 3 years in search of the terms “late talker outcome” or “speech delay prognosis,” I can tell you that there are not enough follow up posts once the kids start talking and it makes those years seem very lonely and very, very long. If you click the tags “speech” or “apraxia” you can see some posts I’ve made about Elias and his language delay. I have some blog entries from Livejournal that I’d really like to get put up here as well, but I’m still trying to figure out how to organize them.

In a nutshell, Elias didn’t say a single word until he was 3 years old. Here is a video of how we communicated when he was 2.8 years old:

Somewhere soon after that he did start learning phonics, but he practiced those sounds in isolation for about 6 months before using single words, which he started using while sounding out written words. This is a video from when he was 3.4, about 4 months after he started talking:

He developed a serious interest in phonics because he then figured out blending and he was using real language. You could see how excited and proud he was of himself, and we were so pleased when he attempted new words that it wasn’t scary at all, more like a fun game. However, he still couldn’t answer even a simple question like “Did you got to the park?” Until he was 3 and a half! We think this is a receptive language delay called MERLD. He doesn’t process language easily, which might be the reason he couldn’t use language either. The processing part is still an issue for him but it’s less and less by each week now. Here is a video from last week:

He talks non-stop from morning ’til night, rarely pausing for thought. He’s still got a little something going on, he doesn’t have the detailed conversations that his peers are capable of, but it will come. Just today he said to us “We had a good day at Target” (we went for the nurse-in but no one was there except us!) totally out of the blue, which is a new step. He’s normally less conversational and more of a narrator.

So, for all those people who find this post by searching “Outcomes for a late talker” or “long term prognosis speech delays,” I share this, something I found myself googling this evening before bedtime:

Prana, Finding My Inner Beast

(photo taken by ryan)

Yesterday was my 6 week postpartum visit with my lovely midwives and we had a chat. Isn’t that exactly what we all need at that stage in the 4th trimester? We need to leave the house and reconnect with the world, and we also need to feel supported and understood by other women who know. No one can know like a midwife, that’s a fact.

 I’m feeling up to just about anything now, so long as I can do it with a baby strapped to my chest, but it’s not been an easy 7 weeks since Rainer was born. I was hit with a horrific flu bug that lasted way too long and developed into a sinus infection, I got my very first migraine, I have postural neck pain from nighttime nursing acrobatics, and I dare say a touch of the crazies. Hormones are so ugly, I vote in favor of banishment. Sleep deprivation+making food for another human being who eats every hour+healing body+infection+migraine=a tough “baby moon.”

Last week I went to our family practitioner and presented him with a list of common complaints and had him reassure me that I’m absolutely fine. I felt a little brushed off, but I am glad he isn’t overly alarmist. We agreed to order blood work as a follow up to my pregnancy anemia, and I felt compelled to have my vitamin d and thyroid checked as well. The results came back yesterday and it turns out I’m not anemic in the least, I brought my b12 up to 1038 (from 400), my vitamin d is “optimal,” and my thyroid is great. I have been feeling decidedly non-anemic this last week, no hypotension and no fatigue other than what is expected.

I am so thankful that I had my perfect homebirth and the loving kindness of my midwives during my pregnancy. I have healed in an emotional and physical sense from the experience of this pregnancy and birth. My eating habits are forever changed by seeking out how to heal my body of anemia and a b12 deficiency and my faith in…everything, but especially my own body, has been renewed.

Now! What I intended to write here is how I feel like I got the go-ahead from my body to move forward with my health goals. There is nothing that needs fixing quite like my inner beast. You know how there are people who just exude strength and glow with superior fitness? I want to be one of those assholes. The person you see in the co-op and they’re aura is like, blinding you with its intensity. I have been told that this comes from a dedication to ex-er-syz? I am starting slowly with a yoga program that has a meditation and daily lesson component as well as pranayama. Starting with the mind, you see. I am also doing this totally insane Couch25k thing, but I don’t want to talk about that here, YET.

I am going to kick 36 in the ass, basically, and that all starts tomorrow.

Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now. -Goethe

1 Month!

Rainer will be 1 month old tomorrow and he is chubbing up quite nicely. He went to the doctor yesterday and weighed in at 11lbs14oz and is 24inches long. He has a different temperament than my other babies did, he’s a bit demanding but not in a colicky way, he just seems like a sensitive soul. He cries like I’m hurting his feelings when I change his diaper or touch him with a chilly hand, it’s heartbreaking. He also squeaks and squawks quite a bit when he’s awake and grunts and snorts in his sleep, a very noisy lad all around.

Eyelashes are coming in, eyebrows not so much.

his face is changing, especially his nose. poor thing musta been so squashed up in that uterus, ha

 I’m feeling okay despite getting this nasty flu just 2 and a half weeks postpartum. It’s one of those lingering illnesses that goes from a sore throat to stuffiness to settling in the chest. Pair the fatigue of a virus with postpartum recovery and WOE IS ME. However, I think it’s almost gone and then I will be feeling great! I’m super ready to get back in the saddle and start doing some yoga. Real yoga, not the kind I’ve been doing while sitting in bed, which is limited to upper body stretching and breathing. Helpful in their own way, but not exactly putting the booty back in it’s right place.

I started meal planning again this week after so many months hiatus. Minestrone, broccoli-quinoa-tofu bowls, sweet potato+black bean enchiladas, and carrot-coconut soup this week. I am so out of the grove of shopping and planning that I’ve forgotten what we used to eat! It’s kind of like starting from scratch but nice to be out of the rut of recycling recipes. I love this time of year for being able to turn on the oven but I’m going to miss summer’s tasty bounty. Goodbye avocados, hello squash.

xo

Rainer Wilde, Chuffed.

4 days old.

A Baby!

I think we finally have a name for this little guy but I need to confer with Ryan on the order of the first and middle name before I announce it.  He is 9.2lbs and very strong. Owen is my serious guy, Elias is my silly guy, this might be my tough guy. We’ll see!

Ryan took the above photo yesterday morning and I haven’t really taken any photos yet but I did edit the birth photos. I’m afraid they might be a little too explicit for posting here, unfortunately. I’ll get to work on some suitable portraits in the next couple days when I’m feel a bit more…vertical.

For someone who gave birth yesterday, I feel pretty amazing. My only true complaint is that my body feels as it should, exhausted. I was shaking from adrenaline and the pushing part of the birth was so intense that my muscles feel tired. There is no comparing how I feel now to how I felt after my two hospital births, that’s for sure. This is the first time I didn’t tear and require stitches or bleed so badly that I was dizzy and unable to stand without assistance. This morning I walked into the kitchen and grabbed a bowl of cereal and sat on the couch and ate it like a normal person. So different!

I am positive that I won’t have enough time to write a really poetic or entertaining version of the birth story for quite some time but I want to get the details down before it’s all very fuzzy. Here’s the best I can do right now:

Something I don’t want to skim over is that I had a baby come out of my body at 42 weeks and 1 day and he is healthy and shows no signs of postmaturity. Since my other two babies were both hospital inductions for postdates,  it was really scary to me to let the pregnancy go on so long, and I did end up having a non-stress test and ultrasound to check out my placental grade. The perinatologist told me that the baby looked great and my midwife reassured me that I would not end up in the hospital again for induction but I let the worst case scenario play out in my head (and discussed it with Ryan) to take the fear out of it a bit. We talked about how it would be fine in the end, and I think that might have been a necessary possible reality for me to face before I could really let go of my fear of induction and let my body take over for my mind. As a society we are so focused on timelines, especially in pregnancy and birth, it’s hard to let go of the unrealistic expectation that every woman gestates the same amount of time and just give ourselves over to the natural process of our unique bodies and pregnancies.  I am so thankful that with this pregnancy and birth I was able to validate what I always felt was true, my body can birth a baby on it’s own. In my experience an induction, epidural, and the general treatment in a hospital birth is much more physically and mentally harmful than the peaceful experience of letting my body gestate, labor, and give birth on it’s own at home. Scared of labor? Only if it comes from an IV drip line!

Okay, so October 8th at 9:30, with no signs of labor approaching, I listened to some meditation music and thought about having the baby. By 9:45 I was having 1 minute long contractions at 3-4 minute intervals. I emailed Laurie and Jessica for a “heads up” and then when the contractions seemed to be getting stronger called Laurie to make sure she got the email. She offered to come over and check me for progress. I was dilated to 5cm and full effaced, baby was way down and engaged, so she stayed put and called Jessica to come over as well.

I labored with Laurie and Ryan in the bedroom for an hour or so and then got in the birthing pool for a while. Contractions felt easier in there and I got nervous about slowing things down too much, I felt like I wanted labor to be fast and difficult rather than longer and more tolerable in intensity, mostly because I was tired already. I got out of the tub and labored in the bedroom again, laying on my side on the bed with Ryan applying hip pressure. My water broke on the second contraction I had in that position. My water breaking felt like a relief of pressure, and I felt the baby moving way down. Back to the birth ball again,  this time rolling my hips back and forth pretty vigorously. I knew I was definitely in transition, contractions were MUCH more intense and came with almost no break between them. I said out loud “Okay, this is transition, how much longer?” ha!  Leaked more water with each contraction and felt the baby’s head descend for pushing. I asked my midwives when I would know to start pushing and when they said “When you feel like it” I was kinda skeptical but they were definitely right, there was no mistaking when that time came.

I started to feel a lot of pressure all of a sudden and wanted to move to all fours, using the bed to support my upper half. Ryan sat facing me and I needed to hand squeeze through this part. The involuntary pushing was just so unlike anything else. I think I said something about not being able to do it, or not wanting to do it anymore and Ryan said “You’re doing it!” this didn’t go on long at all, just a few contraction before he crowned.

I told Ryan “he’s coming…” (which later seems hilariously ominous in tone) and his head came in the next contraction along with the intense and burning “ring of fire.”  Yow. Pushing was totally weird and I feel as if I did not participate in it at all, my body just did it all on it’s own. Just a couple contractions and he was born completely and was in my arms and nursing! He was so super pink right away and was alert and crying loudly. The brothers both woke up right then and came in to see him. Thankfully they slept peacefully through the whole labor and birth, it couldn’t have gone any more ideally.

Jessica took his stats (9.2oz, 20/21 inches?) and his apgar was 9/10. I had no tearing at all, just an abrasion and bruise. They scored him as “41 weeks gestation” because he didn’t have any signs of postmaturity. His head is impossibly perfect and round, I have no idea how that came out of my body in such good shape! I lost a below average amount of blood, which so cool because it was a fear of mine that I would lose a lot and be anemic after the birth after all my hard work to bring those levels up.

Laurie and Jessica started some laundry and left us around 2:30 am. Ryan, Elias, the baby and I all hunkered down in the bedroom and Owen was already back to sleep in his bed by then. Right as the boys fell asleep a crazy storm picked up and it rained for hours and hours, breaking our year long drought spell. I opened the curtains and enjoyed the fresh rain air and listened to everyone sleep. The baby was tucked into my side and I couldn’t dream of moving him so I just listened to the storm and felt blissful for a few hours which was a different kind of rejuvenating.

Our first day was hazy and dreamlike because of the lack of sleep paired with the ability to look the baby in the face instead of  him being more…abstract. Owen is jazzed, he keeps saying “I can’t believe you had him in the middle of the night. That must be rare.” Elias is acting like a total spazoid and I’m not really sure if he was exactly like this two days ago but it wasn’t as obvious because I had adequate sleep or if he’s reacting in a typical toddler way to something totally mind-blowing. Speaking of mind blowing, the night the baby was born Elias told Ryan “It’s a baby brother!” which is the first time he’s acknowledged what we’ve been telling him for 9 months, that he was going to have a baby brother! ha

Final score, me and 4 dudes. I’m out-numbered for life!

xo

 

 

Still Pregnant! 41weeks+5days

This photo was actually taken 5 days ago and I’m definitely bigger now than I was here, if that’s even possible. I feel like the baby had a growth spurt this week, just like Elias did at this stage in my pregnancy with him. He was 9lbs 6oz so…

I had acupuncture this morning and found it to be a pleasant experience overall. I couldn’t relax like I normally would in such a serene environment because I am always starving. I was just laying there thinking about food the whole time, haha! If I’m not in labor by tomorrow morning I might go back for another session.  I have an appointment for a non-stress test tomorrow morning at the perinatologist to check fluid levels and placental degradation. Hopefully all will look a-ok and I will be sent home to not worry until this baby comes on his own time. The NST I had with Elias was the beginning of many interventions and doubt, so I will be entering into the medical building armed with information and strength. I don’t think this specific doctor would strong-arm me into an induction unless it was absolutely urgent. He speaks at midwifery conferences and is supportive of homebirth for sure. Still! Having to defend your desire to let nature take it’s course is weird, and the more I think about it the more it pisses me off.

These last days I have been having bursts of energy and bouts of extreme fatigue. I can clean the whole house and bake cookies and go out into the world one minute and the next minute I take a 2 hour nap because it’s MANDATORY for me to continue to function. The weather has finally been more favorable so going out is actually an option in the last few days, very nice after this 4 month summer we just endured.

My plans for the rest of this pregnancy are on a minute by minute basis. I could go into labor in 2 minutes or not for a few days, but it is happening SOON. I feel I’ve completed all of my to-do lists and I’m just ready to do my work and meet our new baby.  I got a few skeins of yarn to make myself a scarf but I hope I don’t get to finish it.  ; )

Please send labor dust! xo

 

More Pregnancy and Nutrition Talk

elias, 2009

I’ve been learning so much about nutrition throughout this pregnancy and it’s very exciting! What I’ve learned with the help of my midwives and Google Scholar will change my life and health forever.  I feel confident that after I birth this boy (any time now!) I will be in better health than ever before in my life. I still need to figure out how to work exercise into my life with a newborn, but you know, first things first!

I brought out my copy of Eat to Live and Disease Proof Your Child because even though I am familiar with the books (to say the least) it was good to have a refresher course in basic whole food diets at this point in my research. I’ve been reading them both in bed every night and feeling inspired to make more and more changes to my diet no matter how hard the transition might seem. Well, transitioning for the grown ups and toddler is easy enough, but stripping all processed food from a 9 year old’s diet is HARD, especially when he doesn’t eat beans unless they’re re-fried and refuses 90% of all vegetables no matter how they’re prepared. The Eat to Live mindset is Food As Fuel Not Filler (I made that up, but it summarizes the plan) and it would do us all a great service to change our mind completely about why we eat what we choose to eat. How does our food serve us? Don’t get me wrong, there is room for pure indulgence, it’s just a matter of viewing those indulgences as they are and not as a part of our daily diet.

A good rule of thumb for indulgence is Bake it, Don’t Buy it. If you have to make it, you won’t eat it as often. I made a pumpkin cake this week and it was delicious. It wasn’t healthy or low calorie AT ALL (although it was vegan) but it was better for us than buying a box of Oreos that hang around and tempt us all week. Clearly defined moderation is key.

This isn’t about losing weight (although Fuhrman’s Eat to Live book is) for us, it’s about improving our lives through food. Less disease, less mood swings, better sleep, and more energy.

This photo of cracks me up because my copy of Disease Proof Your Child is right there on the fridge. Although I had read the book at this point and we were eating vegan, we still had not adopted a lot of the core values. Since I was breastfeeding a lot I needed food, and a lot of it, and that’s hard to do when you’re eating whole plant foods for the majority of your diet. I was making a lot of curries for dinner and eating them the next day for lunch but it still wasn’t enough food in hindsight. I want to be more prepared this time.

Here is a sample of a few things I’ve been eating lately and their nutritional values:

Breakfast: Cream of Wheat with Raisins and Almond Milk

Snack: Kale and Pineapple juice blended with ice: Look at the vitamin k and folate in this one! Nutrients that are especially good for pregnant women, but we could all use a little extra folate, let’s be real. Note: supplemental folic acid is not a good form of folate. Read more here.  Getting folate from food is a great idea, though!

Lunch: Leftover Red lentil soup

Snack: Molasses shake with peanut butter and coconut milk

Dinner: Extra Firm organic tofu, broccoli, sesame seeds, Braggs aminos

As you can see, my nutritional intake is pretty good, but I still take a vitamin d supplement and a b12. I wouldn’t need the vitamin d if it wasn’t 107 degrees here for the last 85 days in a row because I’d be getting my natural supply. Being pregnant in this heat does not make me want to bask in the sun, I’m sure you understand. I’ve been taking a 1,000 mg b12 3 times a week and a whole food b complex (megafoods and new chapter make good ones) on the off days because they have food based b vitamins and a little b12 but not methylcolbalmin, just cyanocobalmin.

My next topic of research is vegan DHA, wish me luck!

xo

 

b12-folic acid-iron-chlorophyll, oh my!

Sooooo, about those eggs I was eating… I stopped. I stopped a while ago, to be honest. I just could not handle the smell or taste of them. After being vegetarian for so long, and vegan as well, the smell of animal products is really weird and not pleasant. It’s like you can smell the food the animal ate in the food you are eating, and it’s weird. Eggs smell like a barnyard to me, and I tried hard to change that, but alas…

I got my next blood panel back and the eggs weren’t helping anyway. My iron is right at 11.1, which is the low end of normal, and my b12 is around 400, which is considered “not grave” but not good either. This is entirely my fault and not the fault of veganism or vegetarianism. Every single vegan I know is very aware of their body’s needs and meets them without any problem whatsoever. What happened to me is that I began eating an animal-free diet at a really young age when we didn’t have the internet to school us, and the books written on the subject were few. I did read the vegan books at my local library, which focused mostly on ethical or environmental points. No one ever told me to take a b12 vitamin or that I might need to be sure I was getting enough iron and folic acid. I was, however, told that I wouldn’t get enough protein, which is a hilarious myth of vegetarian/veganism. Protein is in everything, it’s the micronutrients we need to focus on.

All of this said, and considered, anemia is not a vegan/vegetarian issue. I have friends who are omnivores who are anemic or have b12 or folic acid deficiencies. I read a lot of nutrition communities and pregnancy and birth communities and the women who are concerned with their blood levels are rarely vegan. Sometimes it’s easier to just assume you are getting enough of everything you need when you eat a typical “balanced” diet, but that it far from true. Our bodies, I have learned, need a lot of green stuff. They use the green stuff more efficiently, and there are less calories per protein or iron count than animal products. I’ve been knee-deep in research on heme and non-heme iron sources and I’m nowhere near the point of discounting animal protein as a good source of iron, but the animal products that contain high iron? SO GROSS; livers, hearts, marrows, clams! Ack, blergh! Chicken, hamburgers and fish? Not so great. You’d be much better off eating; lentils, white beans, cereals, pumpkin seeds, and molasses than the ordinary meats that people eat for lunch and dinner on a regular basis. Another issue is that calcium interferes with iron absorption, so eating that burger with cheese? Not a great idea. Eating a steaming lentil curry followed by a fresh orange? Awesome idea.

Another thing I’ve learned is that while I won’t debate that a pure, raw, dairy product is awful to have on occasion (for your health, not ethically speaking),  they are not a great source of any dietary requirement we need other than fats. There is no reason to eat dairy for calcium, it is plentiful in plants, and the other vitamins (A and D) are just enriched anyway and you can get them from enriched milks from plant sources like; rice, soy, almond, coconut, hemp, or oat. If you can’t find an alternative milk you like with so many options, you might have a mental block. Plus, is the taste of milk really that important? You just pour it on cereal or stick it in your tea. It’s not worth the damage to the planet or the animals, at all.

As an aside, I think pasteurization is a joke, and I get the raw dairy thing. I don’t think it’s essential to eat those products, but I am not against raw dairy folks. Mostly they want better conditions in farms including better feed (grass instead of grain) and no use of hormones, pesticides, or antibiotics that are found in your current grocery store dairy products.

As I continue to research iron and b vitamins, I find myself on a winding path that seems…eternal. There is a lot of room for debate and conflict within the various communities. There are a ton of conflicting studies on these issues, and a lot of it relates to who is funding and reviewing studies. What I have found to be universal, is that our bodies need more b12 than we are currently putting in them and it’s not exclusive to vegetarians.  In a specific study where 3,000 people were tested, 16% were below optimum b12 serum levels.  This study was funded by the USDA so of course they suggest “eat more dairy” but the largest studies are often funded with dirty money. Ahem. Still, the point is that 16% of the United States is not vegan or vegetarian, and they are lacking b12 in their diet.

How do I plan to kick ass and take names? I’ve exchanged my bread products for seeds and my pretzels for dried fruit. Where I used to snack on popcorn, I’ll now eat a bag of pumpkin seeds and dried cherries. Ryan and I have been cooking meals together at night and thinking about the combinations of foods we’re preparing. Lots of quinoa, tomatoes, beans, garlic (looooove garlic), braggs acids, lemon juice, kalekalekale, and a little carb like a fresh tortilla or bread. The carb is not the meal, ever, although the more I read about baked potatoes, they more I’m willing to make an exception for those. Lot’s of iron, especially in the skin.

Cooking in an iron skillet is a tip I can safely pass along. It will increase the iron content in your food substantially. It’s time to throw out those non-stick pots anyway; the chemicals on those things scare the crap out of me. We have been using only cast iron and stainless steel for a year or so and I love the cast iron so much. Tomatoes can taste kinda different in a cast iron pot but they are one of the best foods for absorbing the iron from the pot. Cook pasta sauce or chilli in iron!

Prune juice is a great source of iron and although it’s sort of weird, I kind of like it. I’m still getting used to blackstrap molasses but so far they are winning in pancakes, in oatmeal, and in smoothies. I already liked sunflower, pumpkin, and sesame seeds but I am beginning to LOVE them. Cook some extra firm organic tofu rolled in toasted sesame seeds with broccoli and braggs animo acids on them and be totally sold on sesame forever. SO TASTY. Even my 9 year old eats this one, and that’s saying something, trust me.

There’s a whole flipside to this stuff that I’m just starting to explore and it relates to heart disease and too much iron in the blood. You can read up on that via google scholar if you are so inclined, but I’m warning you that it’s a total wormhole. We may never see you again. In a nutshell, some studies suggest that low iron stores are more healthy than high iron stores. Possible related to the consumption of meat in the people who get heart disease, though. Not many studies done on vegans and excess iron, hard to find a study group for that one, ha.

So, today I am taking some Floradix every morning, which is a low dose whole-food iron supplement. I also take a methylcolbalmin for b12 to try and make up for my terrible misstep in regard to getting that regulated before getting pregnant, and I am also going to try out chlorophyll in the evenings. A few drops in my water before bed, no more than that. It’s supposed to increase blood oxygen levels and I’m mostly interested to see if it will make me feel a bit more peppy in these last days of pregnancy.

One last note on animal products and vitamins. I completely understand that a lot of people don’t like supplements and feel that any diet that requires on (b12 in the case of vegans) is not healthful. I call shenanigans on that argument, mostly due to the research that exists about the amount of chicken you’d have to eat in a day to meet your b12 requirement, especially while pregnant and breast feeding. If you have to eat a hamburger, a chicken leg, and a turkey sandwich in a day to meet your b12 requirements, you aren’t eating enough of the other things your body needs for optimum health. Namely, fiber, folic acid, calcium, and even iron.

This concludes another controversial blog post that will no doubt lead to a steep decline in my readership. Ask me if I care.

xo!

True genius resides in the capacity for evaluation of uncertain, hazardous, and conflicting information. -Winston Churchill