I haven’t been pro-vaccine for a long time, since I got the flu vaccine in my 20s and felt terrible.

Now that we’re facing a potentially bad flu year, there is a lot of talk about vaccines for flu and specifically for H1N1/Swine Flu. I’m hoping that the alternative folks are right that the best way to avoid getting seriously ill is by avoiding refined foods — especially sugar and flour — and generally eating a healthy diet, along with giving our bodies assistance in fighting things naturally by getting chiropractic work, acupuncture or craniosacral therapy.

But we don’t always get the sleep, exercise, or nutrition that we need, so I’ve ordered from Perelandra the 2009-2010 Flu Season Balancing Solution from the Microbial Balancing Program and also FSBS+, which is supposed to address pandemic strains of the flu. These bottles are $10-15 and from a farm local here in Virginia. I know some folks are hoping their homeopaths can make a homeopathic version of the standard vaccine.

I hope that we can do okay, as we did last winter on health and wellness except for the week after the Holistic Moms chapter launch (and the Inauguration, which was an exciting but very long day). The following week, my son came down with an ear infection that I’m pretty sure was his system’s response to his mom’s stress. That lasted over a week but cleared without drugs. We were still nursing at the time, though, and this year, he won’t have that protection.

This season, I hope we can find the inner balance we need and can count on the Perelandra solutions (the above, as well as the Immune and Lymphatic solutions) to stay healthy.

This post originally appeared on DC Metro Moms on January 7, 2009

Mama Wants to Run

I heard about a new half-marathon organized to support women runners. When I looked up the Zooma Annapolis race and read about post-race pampering, the event sounded too frou-frou, “something you’d do with a girlfriend,” my sister-in-law said. But when my MAT practitioner not only gave me the all-clear to train but also said, “So what?” to my hesitation over the event’s girliness, I decided to register for the June 1st race.

What surprised me during the race was that my mommy identity and my running identity finally felt compatible. I’d always felt a little guilty going out to run or do yoga, even though I knew that taking care of my body made me a healthier, happier mama. No matter how good it was for my family, training still took up a lot of time. Well, I was  in good company in the Zooma race full of mothers. On the wooded Baltimore-Annapolis trail, women were chatting about babysitting, school, breastfeeding. Children in strollers with papas lined the open sections of the route. I felt so excited to have these identities of mother and runner no longer in opposition to each other, when I got to the after-race Expo and saw the Mommy Goddess booth selling t-shirts, I bought two.

But that was June. I didn’t keep up a training pace in the summer. I hadn’t run more than five miles since the half-marathon when, in late September, I ran about 8.5 with a friend who was training for the Army 10-Miler eleven months after the birth of her second son. Having myself always been a solo runner – never confident enough to become a member of See Mommy Run – I was nervous to run with this one-time-near-Olympian who’d already been inducted into her college’s athletic hall of fame. So it was a boost to my ego to hear her say we were going faster than she was used to. The next day in toddler gymnastics, I enjoyed my goofy little warm-up with my son, stretching happily-used muscles.

Then, just a few Mondays later, somehow the slow jog around the bouncy floor and the over exaggerated-modeling lunges became all I could handle. I’d gotten ridiculously out of shape in record time, goddess no more. I didn’t like being more out of breath than two- and three-year-olds. Come to think of it, I also didn’t like the added pudge and the loss of my lean legs.

That October day, as I held my son’s hand on the balance beam, I resolved to put down on these very pixelated pages my Running Goals for Spring 2009 : to do the National Half-Marathon in March and the Cherry Blossom 10-Miler and the George Washington Parkway Classic 10-Miler in April. And I would look for a nearby marathon in May or June.

Okay, so now it’s January, the mother of all goal-setting months. I did at least find out that Frederick, MD has a marathon on May 3 and Wilmington, Delaware has a one on May 17. But I missed the registration for the Cherry Blossom and haven’t done anything about the others yet. And it’s taken me over three months to finally commit these words to cyber-reality.

I swing back and forth, taking off neither in the direction of sloth nor of athleticism. It hasn’t helped that every time I’ve run this fall and winter, it’s either cloudy or else it seems like the sun has started to set by about 1:00 p.m. Where’s the Vitamin D? It seems like you have to get out only after 10 a.m. and before noon these days in order to catch any serious solar power. I swear, Global Darkening is real, and it’s scary. I keep having to drag out the SAD light of yesteryear (but only when my son is out of the house, and then I promptly move it back to the basement before he destroys it).

So it was a nice change of pace this weekend when my husband took our boy to the grocery store and I enjoyed an easy seven-mile run that started at the still-sunny hour of 11:00. I caught rays and got excited about the idea of my husband and son taking a Saturday morning class together this winter. Then I can be sure to have one longer-than-the-gym’s-childcare-will-take-my-kid workout a week. Somehow the knowledge of that regular time makes a difference. Toddler hugs are much sweeter after sweat.

I have yet to click a “Register Now” button, but I’m inching closer. One step at a time.

I am being pulled in opposing directions. Now, my wanting to do several things at once is not a new thing, I freely admit. However, I was starting to feel good about the idea of going to bed early in order to get up early and do yoga or work out and write before my son got up for the day. If I get up at 5:00, I figured, (something I did regularly while teaching high school), I can do 20 minutes of yoga practice at home and then write until he comes downstairs with his dad at 7:00. We’ll get him used to sleeping or at least resting until 6:30, and then he can play quietly in his room or in the hallway while LJ showers and gets dressed. Or, on alternate days, I will write for just a short bit and then go to the gym to return at 7:15, when LJ has started breakfast but is about to be needing to leave for work.

Either way, I thought, I will feel refreshed from an early bedtime, exercise, centering and creative expression. Surely this will make me more than ready to face a day of focusing on my son when we’re together — being fully present with him. And on the days I do have some childcare, I’ll be more on-task for having gotten some ideas down on paper already. I’ll either be able to move ahead on that or work on work or leadership for the moms group I’m starting.

That sounds lovely, but I’m feeling like it just ain’t gonna happen, not without a few rough days of habit change. Why? Because my son is no longer sleeping soundly through the night on his own or in his own room. He paddles into our bed sometimes as early as midnight. Sometimes he just snuggles in, but other times he tries asking to nurse first. I tell him it’s sleepy time, not morning yet, and he usually complies, especially if I have some almond/coconut milk ready for him to drink. But when he wakes at 4:00 and I say no to nursing, he sometimes gets pissed. He whines, telling me “No!” and wriggling his hand back up or down my shirt. This also happens on occasion when I cut him off from the allowed post-5:00 feeding(s). I essentially feel like I’m done with my night’s sleep at 4:00, and that is just too early even if I were getting to bed by 9:00. In fact, on New Year’s Eve, I stayed reading on the couch when my husband took him up to bed, and for some reason that image would not let the boy rest without his mama. So we all went to bed together early that night. And 4:00 still felt just plain wrong.

Yet I never fell back under solidly, and he wanted access to the bar at 5:00 and 6:00, and then he was just up and wanting us all to be up for the day. That is now becoming the norm: he whines, “I’m hungry! I want to go downstairs!” He used to be willing to go play in his room for a bit, maybe bring in a doll or some books to us, but now the suggestion that he amuse himself just upsets him more.

I don’t know what we’re going to do. Since my husband will probably not start his new job this week, I think I’m going to say we bite the bullet and I just leave the upstairs at 5:00 and let them deal with it. I’ve planted seeds of suggestion about this to the boy, which he ignores to ask some unrelated question that seems to be a cue he doesn’t want to hear about whatever I’m saying. I am not in a hurry to wean for good before age three, but we may have to morning-wean or bed-wean. I don’t know if he’s just coming on like gangbusters now in a last-ditch effort to claim the goods before he drops them or what. We had been down to just morning and night until just after Thanksgiving (also just after I ovulated for only the fourth time since he was born); then he was asking around the clock for a few weeks. Since that period ended, he’s tapered back to morning and night, sometimes before nap and only asking otherwise if he gets hurt or is just feeling needy. I ought to read more of How Weaning Happens and Mothering Your Nursing Toddler. My friend’s 13-month-old just stopped on his own — was crying when she’d try to feed him. I just can’t imagine my boy ever wanting to stop. I wonder if there’s something I’m contributing to that dynamic — some need to be needed?

I would like to wean and cleanse before the summer, before considering trying for another child if that’s what we decide to do. If we do go for #2, I would want my body to have some recovery time and to get to the healthiest possible state, which it clearly is not right now. Seeing as it took 29 months to get my first postpartum period, I want to be gentle with myself.

One other thought about the boy is to get serious about restarting remedies. Tonight I gave him Bach Flower Essences Impatiens and Vervain in addition to our first time trying Rescue Sleep — and I could get him back to the craniosacral therapist and get us both into one of our healers who helped before. I also read in Peggy O’Mara’s “A Quiet Place: Your Child’s First Healer” in the new (Jan/Feb 2009) issue of Mothering magazine that the homeopathic remedy Nux Vomica is a go-to helper if you’re waking at 3 or 4 a.m. If I don’t find that I have any in my medicine chest, I think I will pick some up tomorrow and give it a try. And I will also call my pediatrician (a homeopath) to finally get in for an appointment!

“Sugar is a bigger deal for you than gluten,” concluded my doctor as she perfomed muscle-testing on me. A chiropractic neurologist, she was very happy with my progress since my first visit back in October, 10 months ago. At that appointment, I was weepy and not very hopeful. Plus my son was clingy and grabby, a little uncomfortable in his own skin. This time, Dr. Julie just adjusted me and didn’t have to give me any homeopathic remedies. The last time she gave me something that was supposed to address my being revved up and not wanting to stop, pause, or go to bed. I almost fell asleep on the drive home that time.

But this past Wednesday, just back from vacation, I was told I was doing well, but that I had to watch the sugar. This I knew. After I brought fruit back into my diet, my belly started to return. I’d had almost six-pack abs while I was fruit-free and mostly grain-free training for the June 1 half-marathon. But then all those summer fruits beckoned, and I also decided I’d freed myself from an emotional intolerance to chocolate, so I even introduced that along with some refined sugar, of which I’d had very little in recent years.

On vacation in Maine, I enjoyed lots of rice flour and buckwheat pancakes and many a tasty blueberry; see the page with the bears in the book Goodnight Maine. I wish I could show a photo of the book and also of my poor posture/looks pregnant belly. But, alas, my camera either fell out of my pocket or was enticed by my son into the toilet at Burke Lake Park. We were able to download the photos of the train and merry-go-round, but the picture-taking ability is no more.

Trust me, it’s a different look, and I’ve gained back close to six pounds. For a while, I ran out of probiotic — I use Kyodophilus these days because it’s safe to share with my son, who even asks for it in his “special drink,” a spoonful of cod liver oil. But I just don’t think I can tolerate much fruit, and I think I’ve also suffered from non-organic restaurant food that is probably not been gluten-free and dairy-free. In fact, I saw after I’d eaten some brown rice sushi at Whole Foods that the rice includes corn, another no-no for me.

So now do I go back to being as strict with my diet as I was in April? Or is it the lack of running and less yoga that’s making a difference? My back sure is more tired. Or is it the fact that I’m staying up late again so my liver is flushing toxins back into my body instead of out? I can’t seem to get religion about an early bedtime during the summer, but this bloat has got to give me some motivation, unless I’m really choosing it for some reason.

We’ll see how I feel after I get back from three days in a bathing suit on the beach in North Carolina!