I wake each morning excited to see my emails. I am looking for one, that one from my dearest girlfriend who has been through it all with me. She was the one who was there through all the big moments that led to the life I know lead. The one who laughed and cried with me on the floor one night when we asked ‘could it get any worse?’ and we promptly found out it could, with her cutting her hand on broken glass and I, smashing my already smashed head, trying to help her. She has emailed me almost every day since I became pregnant with Lily and was so ill with morning sickness. I needed someone I could be raw with, be silly with, be afraid with and would take each sentence in the email as a stand alone so I could change my feelings as fast as I needed.

Today I got other emails. I got an email from a business venture that I did not clarify enough, that turned sour for all involved, as things were assumed that never materialised. I got an email from my brother, the only person in the world who seems to be able to make me homesick with no effort at all. I love him dearly, talk to him a few times a year but when he does talk to me, it rips me up that I am so far away. This evening as I write here I have just had an email from a friend in crisis, and I await to hear from two other friends who are in stressful times. I have become dependant on email for communication. I like the form, I like that I can write back thoughtfully by waiting until my thoughts are clear, I like that  both people can say all they need without interruption. It has its weaknesses, like tone is hard to convey, and proof reading is important as autocorrect is not always a friend, but all in all, when I look at my computer and there is a little red number beside the postage stamp, I smile… wondering who is reaching out and marvelling at the joy of keeping in contact with people all over the world so easily.

Why didn’t I fail?

Because with so many things going wrong I had to look deeper, I had to work for the things I figured the ultimate birth would give me as payment. I had to let go of guilt, forgive myself, and move forward fast. Denis and I were alone and due to the circumstances of our life at that point we needed to be there for each other. (Side note: Our male housemate was mentally ill, not being treated properly by the system, so he was volatile and often vicious in demeanour wanting us to leave.)

I cried for about two weeks when I thought of the birth, I wondered the ‘what if’s’, I felt bad about the things I felt bad about and I made up my mind to be the best mom I could be. I worked hard to make sure we bonded, I worked hard to make her feel safe when she had those night terrors the first month (I believe because of the drug cocktail we received in the last hours of the very long labour), I made sure I never lost my cool and got frustrated with her. I let myself love her unconditionally no matter the outcome. AND that is the biggest gift, I became completely vulnerable to her, I let her in, I didn’t hold her at arms length from the deepest and most tender parts of my heart for fear she’d love her dad more, for fear I would not be good enough, for all the little and big fears I had about just not being enough.

Now, she is working her way towards her 6 months birthday and I can safely say we had the best birth. Birth is more than simply arriving safely, it is a journey you take together and as a traveller I know that often it is the path you didn’t ever think you’d take that turns out to be the best. You would think I would have learned that after falling completely in love with Denis despite my aversion to the idea. (I’ll write about that another day. 😉 ) Do I want another cesarian if we are blessed to have more kids in the future? No, I learned what I needed to learn by having one with Lily. I don’t have the same fears, I don’t need to do that again. I fear twins now!

My heart is so full with my current family I can’t imagine having two babies at once to add to our family. Thankfully I have another 6 months or more before we even begin to go down that path, and if we are blessed at that time and I get pregnant again… I am sure whatever happens will be the best thing to happen. 🙂

Last Sunday was Mother’s Day and I got a message from a lady I know who asked me to write about my birth experience, before Lily was even born, to tell me she did not want my birth story now. I, like many moms, had a plan, I knew what I wanted and I was willing to put it all on the line to have what I had decided was the best birth for my baby. To say I did not get the birth I wanted was an understatement. Do I think that means it is not worth telling? Absolutely NOT! Hearing that a friend of mine is right now sitting in hospital with her friend who had a traumatic birth made me realise, women need to be empowered.

Lily’s birth was supposed to be a home birth, so smooth and fast that it was a unassisted home birth. Her father was supposed to catch her, she was supposed to be placed on me right away, the cord was not to be cut until it stopped pulsing, she was to be skin to skin on me or her father for as long as possible, days if we could. She was not supposed to be poked, measured, weighed, examined, or otherwise messed with. She was supposed to be welcomed into a tranquil oasis.

The reality was, I pulled a muscle a week before she arrived low in my belly, our labour started at 3:30am Monday morning, we had no home birthing midwife as back up because of the laws in France. Wednesday morning we headed to hospital as nothing was happening but endless contractions and no sleep for me. I could not lay down, not to sleep, not even to rest. They said ‘yes  you are in labour, come back when the waters break’. Thursday night I was running out of energy in a bad way. I was so tired, I had lost control of my bladder, I sat a foot from a roaring fire or swayed back and forth in pain, Denis did all he could to help me but I needed help from the doctors. They said I could stay but I should just go home until the waters broke. I was so tired, I went home, could not sleep, could not lay down, could not eat… and I stayed strong still hoping for our planned birth. Friday found me hallucinating with fatigue and we headed back to the hospital. This time they admitted me and after a epidural and breaking my waters and drugs to make my cervix open it was decided that it was a no go. Lily needed out a different way, as my body refused to let her go.

Strapped to the table, curtain up they cut my baby from me, once she was out of the room I gave in. All of my worst nightmares had happened. Intervention, early cord cutting, drugs, surgery, I had failed.

But did I? Who did I fail?

Part 2 tomorrow.

Mondays are a great day for us. We start slow, we are mindful, we shop for groceries for the week, we enjoy each other, we plan our week a bit, we express gratitude for our life.

This morning we started out by watching a few Ted Talks in bed while Lily slept. Inspirational stuff, informative stuff and a little bit of fun. It is good to inspire your self each day and I really like having a good start to the week. They were all from a compilation of the top 20 TedTalks of all time. We had seen a few already but some things are best heard more than once.

So we promptly had a scrap at lunch, we ended in laughter and to be honest I don’t remember now what it was about.

Denis filled the house with more wildflowers, he brings home wildflowers for Lily and I. He patiently sat with Lily on his lap making bouquets for the house. I am surrounded by flowers now and I love it.

We missed the morning market but we won’t lose any sleep over it. We hit the grocery stores in the afternoon, keeping on track for our healthy eating we found organic and fresh foods, treats are not nuts and berries rather than ice cream and chocolate bars and to be honest… I like it better that way. We went to a garden centre and got a few more seedlings for the garden, including snapdragons, one of my favourite flowers as a kid. Tomorrow we will plant them if the weather looks good for the week. Next we got the dog food and Denis put Lily in the cart with the bag, something I would not have thought to do… and she stood! Alone! Holding on to the dog food our little girl stood on her own.

I am so grateful we are both here for all the good bits, and the rough bits, the hard bits and the magical bits. Yep I live a life of love, we’ve worked hard for it so I won’t apologise for it, I won’t look harder to see if it is not so special, I am not going to twist the story to make it acceptably tough. We walked that path, and though the work has not ended we have reached a level of happiness that few often attain. And we feel like there is so much more in store for us. I hope we pass that along to Lily, our joy for life and our desire to keep wanting more joy, more love and more happiness without thinking that our current life is not perfect the way it is.

Sugar cube anyone?

When I have been walking into the kitchen for the last 24 hours it has been rather entertaining. I keep thinking I should nibble on a sugar cube, well not nibble but crunch it down with all the stealth and speed of a thief in the night. I was preparing for emotional fallout from the decrease of sugar and caffeine but not the funny craving of wanting to eat sugar, plain and simple sugar. In a way it makes it easier not to slip up, the first time I went off gluten I found that I slipped up all the time. Sometimes I would not know gluten was in the item and sometimes I would not be thinking and I would consume it. Avoiding eating sugar cubes is so much easier than reading labels. We also have a diet that is 95% unprocessed foods, which makes all the difference in the world when you are changing your diet.

Diet is so important on so many levels and yet very few of us really pay attention, or care to pay close attention, to what we eat. I saw a TedTalk once given by a lady who admitted that she was a professional marketing agent who purposely tricked people into buying foods they might not want to consume if they knew the real truth about it. Then she did the shocking thing by telling people in the audience that it was easy because they wanted to be fooled. We don’t want to take responsibility for our choices, we make excuses why we can’t or won’t and you know what? I did too.

Not anymore, now we are making the right choices for optimal health. I studied this, I know the right choices, I know the cost of not making them and it is no longer acceptable. We are being held back by our diet, our life is fantastic but how much more fantastic can it be if we eat like we are training for the ultimate life? Because that is what we are doing, we are challenging ourselves to have the best life we possibly can, to be part of a movement towards real living, those who throw aside societies expectations and live a life of passion.

How can a person live a life of passion if their body is polluted? Seems what was a diet change to make a rash go away has turned into a life choice for us. They say having kids changes you, for us, it makes us want to be the roll models we want around Lily. We also know, the further we go with our personal growth the further she can go, isn’t that what all `loving parents’ want? The best start for their kids so their kids can go further than the parents dreamed? We don’t know where Lily’s path will take her, but we are going to do whatever we can to make her strong and ready for her journey. Enjoying every minute.

The day started out beautifully and continued in that manner, as do most days. So I am wondering if this is a chance to see what else I should talk about… Maybe I will talk a bit about why I don’t want to talk about certain things… yet!

I read a few articles on vaccine fraud, bullying and fear mongering on a few other health topics as well that are close to my heart. I don’t tend to get involved in the chats much nor do I invest a lot of energy into expressing my knowledge on the matter. I find like to keep current with health and human right issues, especially those that could affect my family or my practice. I don’t tend to feel the need to volunteer my opinion much, especially in public forums but privately if a person comes to me concerned about certain things and asks where I stand I am happy to impart what I know about these topics though my classroom, clinical and personal studies.

Why don’t I make public announcements on hot topics? Mostly because I find that since I am not doing the direct research and only compiling knowledge based on other peoples experience I would only be able to write an informed opinion piece, referencing this and that study. I may yet do that here, for those who are interested but because these are hot topics I am referring to, information gets old fast as new light is constantly being shed on what we know, what we think we know and what was a blatant lie. I find opinion pieces just give people a reason to get fired up and stuff their belief systems down each others throats and I have no desire to fight peoples belief systems who are not willing to listen to the other side. Who do not want the truth but only want to be right or are afraid of the ramification if they are wrong.

So, most of my day was spent with my loving family, we did things a little different today, spending time helping out friends again, weeding a driveway! Hours of weeding a driveway, and yes we made it fun. How can you not have fun when you are married to your best friend? So that and two swallows in the kitchen and dog walking and eating good food and naps with Lily while daddy did more work on this farm we live at and posting stuff for Lily’s passport application and talking and laughing and and… all in all a balanced day. Except time got away from me again and I am scurrying to write this fast so I can jump in the tub with Lily before she crashes for the night. Until tomorrow…

The sun and the clouds have been playing hide and go seek all day and even agreeing to share the same sky at times.

Living up on a hill, reasonably close to the ocean, is beautiful, and when the weather plays up it really plays up. Lily spent the day inside, playing. Her rash is gone and she is all back to her curious and happy little self but we did not risk taking her for a walk with the dogs, or any other chores outside… could start out nice then turn to sideways rain in the blink of an eye. Ever watched Forrest Gump? Remember how he talked about experiencing every type of rain while on tour of duty? Well, we did that today in France.

Denis has been chasing rainbows and even now is still running outside to marvel at their beauty, this time with Lily all wrapped up as he is only a few feet from the door. We have seen so many rainbows on our journey, and we always take them as a sign that we are on the right path. Such a joy to enjoy things as simple as the weather and all it has to offer, I think sometimes that my life has been blessed from the beginning. I have never had a proper 9-5 desk job and now I don’t know if I could ever conform. I love what I do, so much that it does not feel like work and my family is such a joy to me that I love that we eat, work, play and grow together.

Rainbows light up my heart everyday.

LOL, the title of this post is what I found after I joyously ran downstairs to grab the last chocolate bar from the fridge. Denis wrote it for me.

You see, we/I have decided to go off chocolate and other foods that don’t nourish us but deplete us. We have been working up to cleaning up our diet for awhile now but we want to be successful so we kept waiting for the perfect time. I was thinking when we leave France it would be easiest but then I realised it needed to be sooner, as that long away was making me ridiculous, I was eating more and more of the undesirable foods, preparing for having to give it up and thinking a couple months long binge would give me the will power to leave it forever, make myself sick of it.

Today I got the perfect motivation to do it now. Lily has been covered in a rash head to toe all day, it has gotten a lot better but last night it showed up and she still has it today. I was figuring it must be something I had eaten and I racked my mind for what it might be. Then I decided it was time, no more junk food. No gluten or chocolate starting right now, it was a easy decision, one look at Lily and I would do anything for her. Next week we will remove more foods that we want to eventually eliminate from our diet. We are not going 100% for life but it will be 100% until Canada at least. We will reassess, often possibly as we find the balance that works for us, but we know for certain we can’t have it in the house. Not at least until something major changes, and when that happens I won’t want it in the house.

Anyways, why was I running, joyously downstairs, to that last chocolate bar if I thought I was causing a head to toe rash on our most beloved breast fed daughter? Well, I spoke to a fellow Heilkunstler who is also a mom and a dear friend and she told me about her own son, how he had been sick at 6 months and to completely rid himself of the virus after the fever broke, he had a, head to toe, rash. Probably not the chocolate! So I ran to the fridge to have my last go at it, Denis had already had his last go about an hour before the message came through. So now we are going to go through detox together, bye bye to the caffeine/chocolate, the sugar, the grains, the dairy, the inflammation and the emotional rollercoaster.

Besides who needs an artificial emotional rollercoaster when we have a Lily! Just now I interrupted writing this post to race around the house with Denis and Lily just to make her giggle. Who needs chocolate?

Lily deserves a medal for getting through her first fever with her parents not falling apart. She was a superhero, not a tear shed, just extra cuddles and longer naps and she sailed right through two evenings of fevers. What a relief, I don’t know about other parents, and I certainly don’t feel like I am a worrier of a parent but I was not looking forward to our first cold. We have used homeopathic so far for the two bumps/frights she has had with great success. She handled her fever so well we did nothing but shower her in love and make sure she was not over stimulated so she could rest as much as she wanted and it worked! Fever is over and a new week begins, with us hopping.

Well not really, it was a chill start to the week but Lily met her first toad. What a joy to experience the world through a child’s eyes. The toad was very cooperative and let us handle him for awhile before hoping off our hands as we stared intently at this new creature. Lily has already learned “gentle” because she has been surrounded by animals since she got home from the hospital. We are blessed that the ‘dangerous/tough guy’ cat loves her and is a complete fool for her, letting her even learn what ‘gentle’ means by yanking on his ears and whiskers with us removing her tightly clenched fists from his fur in those first few months. Dogs, cats and horses have all been ‘in her face’ since the beginning, but this was her first amphibian. She was curious but I am not sure she is impressed yet. Might take a few more visits from cool skinned, soft leathery little souls before she makes up her mind. Personally I hope she likes toads, one of my great joys as a kid was catching, petting and releasing tiny little toads up at our northern property in Ontario. Their little hands fascinated me, they still do, especially the tree climbers. I will never forget the little Spring Peeper I brought to my mom early one morning, he jumped from my hand to her face just as she opened her eyes from sleeping!

You know the situation when you are with someone, and they are lost in thought, so deeply it is like you don’t even exist? Well that has been happening to us a bit this week. You see we are always with each other and so sometimes to find a little personal head space we have to zone out. Denis is much better at it than me. Just say my name and I snap back to being present, not Denis though, sometimes nothing short of a raised voice and rapid movement in front of his eyes will bring him back. This is not a common occurrence in our relationship, but like I said, this week it’s happened more than once.

Now to the point, today it happened at lunch, and I took exception to dining alone while sitting with the man I love. So, I made sure to be noticed and I wanted to be included in knowing his thoughts, so I asked about them, “what are you thinking about?” My question was met with low grade hostility, like I’d interrupted something important and personal. I was shocked, hurt and peeved all at the same time. We don’t have secrets, I just wanted to be included and his hostility was out of line no matter how minor his tone had been. It was this that we used to snark at each other for a very short time before we agreed to disagree.

So less then an hour later I am again asking him about is inner thoughts, he again shut me out. I can be a little thick sometimes. Why do any of us think we are entitled to another’s thoughts unless they willing want to share them with us. I know he always shares with me when it is the right time, or he has had time to figure out the bits and let it mature to something he can talk about, but today I pushed him. I was wrong. So I apologised and we moved on, respecting each others needs.

It is good we can do this, we can talk about anything (when the time is right) and it makes us better for each other and better parents, and tonight Lily needs us, I am not sure but I think she might be fighting a bit of a cold. She has not been herself today and she needs a little extra TLC this evening… so I am off to be one half of a great team and be there for our little girl in what ever way she needs us tonight.