Conscious Mom

We have become a one-car family. I'd love to say that the environmental consequences of driving swayed us to get rid of our second car, but that's not what happened. After 17 years and 271,000 miles our Subaru passed away of old age. Actually, wonderful car that it is, the motor is still fine but the rust on the body made it unsafe to drive. Had this car stayed on the West Coast and not been exposed to the salted roads of NH winters, it would chug along for another several years. To think I hesitated over paying $4500 in 1999 for this car! Since then it has ferried me to and from work every day (an average of 40 ...

Maia went to her first yoga class today. The yoga studios in Portsmouth take turns doing free weekly classes in the park. This week Miss Lisa from Childlight Yoga led us through some fun asanas, complete with songs. The class was like a long game in which we used yoga postures to play out animals chasing each other, flowers opening and closing, and trees swaying in the wind. Maia had a great time. At seven months she didn't know what was going on, but laughed as I moved her in and out of poses, and enjoyed watching the older kids. I think my favorite part was ...

Forget stay-at-home versus work-outside-the-home. Reasonable, intelligent people know there are ways to make both options suitable for children. And most realize that in today's economy not many parents have the luxury of choice when it comes to working. The real hostilities are over sleep methods: co-sleeping, parenting to sleep, sleep training, controlled crying, and cry-it-out all have their ardent supporters and vehement opponents. At times, the more polarized members of different philosophies practically accuse the others of child abuse. Read Whizbang's post on sleep training and the host of comments for a taste of this. To help make sense of this minefield, someone at Antioch University in Seattle is conducting a ...

I've been reading a lot recently about the importance of play in childhood. Over the years there's been a steady decline in the amount of spontaneous play time for children. TV, video games, fear of abduction, over-scheduling of children, reducing recess for test prep time have all had their effect. Now there are eight year-olds who don't know how to make up games, twelve year-olds who don't know how to enjoy themselves without structured entertainment, and an ever-dwindling national attention span. This is one of those times when I wish I were bringing up Maia in a different generation. I want her to have the same sense of freedom and timelessness that so many ...

Sometimes I forget that I didn't give birth to Maia. I feel so close to her and so wrapped up in her life I have to remind myself that we haven't been together since day one. Bonding isn't an instantaneous thing. The intense parental love doesn't always start at the first sighting of the referral photo or first meeting; it grows over time. Even biological mothers have told me that they didn't fall in love in the delivery room, but felt their love building over the first weeks and months of their child's life. By now though, Maia is as connected to Bodhipaksa and me as any seven month old child is to her parents. She watches as we leave the ...

by Dr. Harvey Karp. Before I read this book I thought I'd have little use for it. Karp wrote this book for parents of seemingly inconsolable babies in the first three months of life - those tiny infants who have hours-long crying jags for no discernible reason. If Maia ever had those long crying spells, she had outgrown them by the time we met her. Curiosity, not desperation led me to read this book. I had heard so many people refer to this book as a lifesaver that I had to find out what the fuss was about. Karp divides the book into two parts: theory and practice. The theory comes first. Karp terms the first three months of a baby's life ...

Depressing news for today: Mattel and Bonnie Bell are developing a line of make up for 6-9 year old girls. Great, just what parents need, one more product pushing our daughters to grow up way before they are ready. A few months ago I was in Target and saw bras in sizes 4-6X (that's for ages 4-6, for those unfamiliar with girls' clothing sizes). To those who say parents should simply control what their children are exposed to, I wholeheartedly agree. But I also ask marketers and the media to allow me to exercise this control. Leave me a few places I can take my daughter where we are free of products, images, and characters designed to sell ...

We had a Naming and Blessing ceremony for Maia last Sunday. We wanted a rite of passage to welcome her into our family, one that felt more emotionally and spiritually significant than a judge's paperwork. We designed the ceremony ourselves using elements from Buddhist traditions and rituals. After a brief introduction by our officiant, Dayalocana, we began by honoring Maia's birth parents. So often adoption is celebrated as a joyful, family-building event, yet it is often predicated on sorrow. This is especially true for orphans from Ethiopia. Had they survived, Maia would have been her parents' first child, and I imagine they eagerly anticipated her arrival as much as we did. To honor ...

Time/CNN has a slide show showing pictures of a week's worth of food for different families: http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1626519,00.html I thought the Eqyptian's and Bhutanese's selections of food looked the best. Our kitchen table would have a lot of vegetables, tofu, oatmeal, bread, fruit, pasta, rice, Amy's frozen pizzas, soy milk, and Tofutti Cuties. Unlike a lot of the Western families in the photos, we don't have a TV in our kitchen.

Now that Maia is close to seven months old I'm being more deliberate in my communication with her. I've shortened my sentences from rambling streams of consciousness to short in-context descriptions, and point out objects and say their name. The idea is that she'll be more likely to understand words if there are fewer of them. She tries to communicate back. We have long conversations consisting of nothing but babble. Whether she thinks she is saying anything is unknown, but she is delighted with these exchanges, often breaking out into laughter. A music teacher friend, who is also a very experienced parent and grandparent, told me it is important to match her pitch ...