Parent Extremis

I just got an email from another blogger who has a baby the same age as Noah and after reading one of my postings about finally getting the baby to sleep for a nice long period of time, things are about to hit the fan because it is just about TEETHING time. Can I get a collective sigh of URGH.

I think the baby is starting the whole dreaded teething phase. He drools like a fountain and gnaws excessively on his hand, my hand, my shoulder, the dirty washcloth in the bathtub, you get the idea. His top row of gums have puffed up in the shape of little baby teeth. The bottom hasn’t shown too much action so far.

Babies can start teething as early as three months and some don’t show any signs of teeth appearing at their one year birthday but for most babies, the little nubs start cutting through that soft gum tissue somewhere around seven months of age, just for an average.

Sometimes breastfed babies will start to bite when they are teething. They are not doing it to hurt you, but rather because their gums are sore and biting down feels good but rest assured you can teach them not to bite. Moxie has written a good piece about breastfed biters.

The teething ring pictured at the top of this article is made out of all natural maple wood. It is made in the United States and is free of chemicals, most importantly, lead but also there is no potentially toxic gel inside. It is sold on Amazon.

When your baby starts teething and you want to offer some organic means of gum soothing, consider offering them a washcloth damp with cool water at room temperature or one that has been refrigerated for awhile. The cool sensation will gently and naturally numb their gums. Some babies will take to chewing on a pacifier. Even if the baby hasn’t liked a paci in the past, consider showing them they they can chew on it now. Sippie cup spouts are just about the right size to be chewed on. Overall, just choose something safe and large (READ: NON-CHOKE-ABLE) that your baby likes to chew on. Anything that takes the edge off of their discomfort is a good option.

There are also a hot of over-the-counter medicines including Tylenol and Orajel, a benzocaine-product. It is recommended that you speak with your pediatrician before offering any of these products.

Noting that what makes household products clean so effectively is also what makes it kill living tissue, including our own, my wife and I tend to use natural cleaning agents such as baking soda and vinegar. My wife likes to mix the two together, because it seems more impressive. I think it neutralizes them, but oh well. Before we got pregnant, we cleaned fifty years of soot from our chimney with those products and a stiff brush. Amazing results. But we could have used a sandblaster, sulphuric acid, or nuclear fusion. It would have eliminated the stains. And the house.

The New Homemaker has the run down on Household Cleaners: The 3 Worst Poisons Under the Sink.

Parents often wistfully wish they could raise their children differently, spend more time with them, teach them themselves, protect them from pervasive influences. Their wistfulness implies it’s good, but it isn’t possible for them.

Well, is it good for their children to continue the way they’re going? Or just convenient for them? If what we’re doing is not good for our children, why don’t we make the necessary sacrifices to change what we’re doing?

Sure, society is against us, everybody does it this way, and hardly anybody does it the way we wish we could do it. No, I can’t change society, at least not right now, but I can change my family life. I can’t change what’s on television, but I can change the channel. I can unplug the television.

Maybe you’d like to give birth in a non-institutional setting, but your company insurance doesn’t cover midwives. Believe me, from personal experience, the difference is worth it. Under most circumstances, it’s safer and maybe it’s even better for your baby’s development to stay out of the hospital nursery. Why choose an unnatural, second-class experience for your child just because it’s not approved by your authorities?

People say that it’s too hard. It’s too different. Well, getting rid of a malignant tumor is hard too, harder than learning to live with it. But if to live, or to live more abundantly, I might have to do hard things.

Finances come into play in all of this, of course. Parents have to raise their children like other people do because they can’t afford to do it differently. They can’t afford to leave their job and work from home, with their children. They can’t afford to move out of their neighborhood or out of the city. But consider our children, maybe we can’t afford not to.

According to last month’s British medical journal The Lancet, premature babies are less likely to die of a common scourge of preemies, necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC), if they are given probiotics - good bacteria.

Most babies born naturally will soon develop bifidobacteria in their large intestines, including B. infantis, B. bifidum, B. longum, and B. breve. These vigorous micorganisms can fight off germs such as E. coli, Klebsiella, and even Salmonella. Such germs are suspected of helping to cause NEC.

Unfortunately, as soon as my son was born, they began pumping antibiotics into his bloodstream. The doctors weren’t familiar with long labors, and assumed that his high white blood cell count was caused by infection, when it was apparently caused by stress. So they proceeded to wipe out his good bacteria with the latest medical science, which was too far behind the times to know much about intestinal flora. Every subsequent test showed my son had had no infection. But once you start a course of antibiotics, you have to stay the course.

Several days later, when we asked our doctor why our healthy newborn son was still in the hospital, he replied with a principle: “We have to treat the hundred children who don’t need it in order to save the one who does.”

The same principle was used to explain why he was whisked away to the nursery as soon as he was born. If you believe, as many natural childbirth people do, that bonding in the first hour of life is critical, that means that one hundred children are needlessly damaged on the outside chance that one of them might not survived if he or she weren’t damaged.

And it meant that, when we finally got home, I had to squirt probiotics into my son’s mouth with a syringe, to cure him of a sort of diarrhea typical of people who have recently been dosed with antibiotics. He began to perk up in a couple of days.

It reminds me of what my grandmother told her physician as she was approaching 100: “What do I owe my long life to? Staying away from doctors.”