While the International Cesarean Awareness Network (ICAN) was having its big conference in St. Louis this weekend, Birth Matters Virginia was putting on the Healthy Mothers, Healthy Birth Summit on Saturday, and Ina May Gaskin was leading a rally on the Capitol Sunday with her Safe Motherhood Quilt project. Both D.C.-area events aimed to shed…
Activism & Politics
Birth activists to hold conference and rally
“Midwifery and Homeopathy” was the subject of a weekend workshop I attended last year at a conference sponsored by the National Center for Homeopathy. The information I gleaned from presenter MJ Hanafin, and later from an interview with Miranda Castro, author of Homeopathy for Pregnancy, Birth and Your Baby’s First Years, put me on the…
Food dyes: FDA misses the opportunity to help children
I was so excited to hear that the FDA was taking on the issue of food dyes and considering banning them or requiring a warning label. People deserve to be protected from foods that cause such havoc in young brains. Unfortunately, the FDA voted 8 to 6 last week not to ban artificial food dyes…
Advocate for local food at Farm Food Voices 2011!
On Wednesday, March 16, local food advocates will convene on Capitol Hill for a grassroots lobby day. If you care about where your food comes from, join them! Farm Food Voices says: “Join a coalition of organizations, local food advocates, and small family farmers from across the country to lobby federal legislators on local food…
Foundation airs its criticisms of USDA and presents alternative guidelines
Read more about Real Food at Kelly the Kitchen Kop’s Real Food Wednesdays Blog Carnival! On Monday, February 14, the Weston A. Price Foundation made its criticisms of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s dietary guidelines crystal clear. For anyone who had assumed the governmental agency must be doing its best to ensure the health of…
Hirshhorn nurse-in a huge success!
At least I got in some lactivism this weekend! It has been a long string of days with a dramatic, exuberant, clingy, whiny and non-stop-talking almost-five-year-old and a not-much-sleeping, perennially-teething (but happy!) six-month old. So I will save the full report on yesterday’s nurse-in at the Hirshhorn Museum for another time (will link if it…
WAPF to release alternatives to USDA guidelines
At 9 a.m. on Monday, February 14, the Weston A. Price Foundation is holding a press conference to explain its concerns about USDA dietary guidelines and to offer its alternative. WAPF’s Healthy 4 Life guidelines can been viewed in this pdf or ordered in a $10 booklet. I’m so excited that this information is finally…
I’m no one with out my sling
Welcome to the February Carnival of Natural Parenting: Parenting Essentials This post was written for inclusion in the monthly Carnival of Natural Parenting hosted by Code Name: Mama and Hobo Mama. This month our participants have shared the parenting essentials that they could not live without. Please read to the end to find a list…
New food labels tell only part of the story
If the food industry has its way, shoppers will soon see an at-a-glance view of a product’s nutritional profile on the front of the package, separate from the complete nutritional information. The mini-profile will list the calories, fat grams, milligrams of sodium, and grams of sugar in big numbers (sometimes with a highlighted important “nutrient”…
When a friend gets cancer
I didn’t even know what the term lymphedema meant when Susan Niebur of Toddler Planet blog told me she was working out a deal to have compression sleeves made available to women who can’t afford them. I hadn’t ever met Susan, but I knew she was in a rough place with a recurrence of cancer;…
Feelin’ the Holistic Moms love
What a surprise I got tonight when my Holistic Moms co-leaders and members presented me with flowers and a (gluten-free, dairy-free, soy-free, refined-sugar-free) cake at our monthly meeting! We decided not to do a huge anniversary party again this year after last year’s blow out, and I wasn’t really missing all the stress! But they…
“Lunch Line” documentary tells important story of school lunch
When I learned from the DC Urban Moms calendar that the documentary Lunch Line was going to be screened downtown at Busboys & Poets last Sunday night, I could hardly contain my excitement. School lunch is an issue I’ve been getting very interested in, especially with the passage of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act in…
Real Food Wednesday – School Lunch Reform?
View more posts about Real Food at Kelly the Kitchen Kop’s Real Food Wednesdays blog carnival! The new “Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids” Act signed on December 13 is getting a lot of positive feedback for the changes it will make to the federal school lunch program, but there are some reasons to hold back praise. I’m…
Study says kids don’t want sweet cereals
I just learned from Nancy Piho’s My Two-Year-Old Eats Octopus blog about the results of a new study on children and cereal. In a study published in Pediatrics, Yale researchers found that children will eat low-sugar options if they are offered. The gist is “If you serve it, they will eat it,” suggesting that offering…
More on healthy food in schools!
My visit to Barcroft Elementary school’s Farm to Table celebration (referenced here last week) is now described in more detail on my column at the Washington Times Communities Family Today. Read “Authors, chefs encourage local, healthy food in schools” and tell me what your school is doing — or not doing — to promote healthy…
Grades are not the thing — musings on (Waldorf) education
There it was in this morning’s Washington Post: the same argument against GPAs and SAT scores as a predictor of success that longtime Waldorf educator Jack Petrash had discussed last week at a talk at Potomac Crescent Waldorf School. In his piece in the Outlook section, “To get the real star students, colleges should look…
Book reading as therapy: Monica Lemoine of Knocked Up, Knocked Down
I had the pleasure two weeks ago of hearing Monica Murphy Lemoine read from her book Knocked Up, Knocked Down: Postcards from the Brink of Parenthood while she was in town for a conference on perinatal and infant death. Let me tell you, Monica is no less engaging in person. Her book was already funny…
(Good?) Food in schools
I was so disappointed to miss last weekend’s Wise Traditions conference sponsored by the Weston A. Price Foundation. The topic was “The Politics of Food;” I looked forward to hearing about “The Politics of School Lunches” and in participating in the food activism panel with WAPF publicist and food blogger extraordinaire, Kimberly Harkte of Hartke…
NWSA panel addresses pregnant women and feminism
I was thrilled to learn that my friend Jessica Clements, birth artist and organizer of last October’s “Perinatal” symposium on birth practices and reproductive rights, was part of a panel this past weekend on “Pregnant Women: The Outsiders in the Women’s Rights Discourse” in Denver at the Annual Conference of the National Women’s Studies Association: …
More sad news about anti-gay bullying
Although I mostly think Erica Jong was wrong-headed in her Wall Street Journal piece last week where she said attachment parenting keeps women in a prison and out of politics (see my response and other links here), I do have to admit that, in choosing to stay home with my children, I am not out…