For those of you who've forgotten, this is what she looks like....
It's been a little while now since I became familiar with the idea that to generate power you need to start from a stable point. If the source of the power is unstable, you don't get much going on. Right now this is the bain of my existence!! We're in trial and error land, in "let's see if this works..." territory.
We've put most effort into the food to begin with, as suggested. This has been fairly good. We're not drinking milk. We don't have cheese or yoghurt - except for a moment of weakness the other week when nachos were requested and I relented. We don't have wheat. Since I had spelt checked by Maria and it was ok, I'm using it at the moment while we transition. We've evicted sugar - mostly. We're not buying packaged foods - except coconut milk and coconut cream and some nut/grain milks and some spelt pasta. We're not cooking with oils thesedays except for a little coconut oil when I can sneak it in. It's really good with salmon....
I now own a Le Creuset pot (oooh), it's blue. I also own a cast iron tagine - and I actually know what it is and what it's for! I have a set of 3 - no, 2 glass saucepans. (oops!). I also have a bamboo steamer.
There have been some nights though where I run out of time and realise that I can't cook dinner by dinnertime with what I have in the cupboards, so we get takeaway - which is a bit pointless!!
The extenuating factor has been that we need every member of the family to be in excellent health to pull this off and we've got a couple of stragglers at the moment, so it complicates things. Still, if we can get it all working with all this going on, then we can do it in any terrain.
Anyway, I got the NAET happening again. It had been a few weeks and I was starting to notice that Jacinta's muscle tone in particular was dropping. This has improved again and she's holding her weight on her two legs when I stand her up, which is so great! My other two were doing this from birth pretty much so it's been a real indicator of how floppy she's been by comparison.
Jacinta's on her second back-to-back cold this month, courtesy of the kids at school. Luckily she's pretty robust, and we've been NAETing everything Maria can think of so she's ridden it pretty well and hasn't had any feeding issues and has dodged the hospital admissions that so many of her contemporaries have been experiencing over the past month or so.
I've also been slack with the supplements. (I'm being totally honest here, for the sake of record keeping.) They've been pretty hit and miss, more miss than hit, which is ridiculous considering she's not 100% - but the trouble is that I have to remember and I've been a bit of a sleep-deprived walking zombie!! I need reminding to take my vitamins at the best of times. No excuse, but there we are.
Also, we've been getting as much floor time in as we can. I've been putting her down whenever she's not completely unwilling. I've had to time the prone floor time (tummy time) for when she's not immediately post-feed or she winds up with a face full of baby chuck pretty quickly, and I hear about it. (Quite understandably.) Add this to the head cold and you can imagine the slimy muck she finds herself in quite often in the prone position.
Being winter (because in Australia it is winter right now - for anyone who isn't sure) the floor is also freezing, and I still haven't come up with a solution for that. Trying to put things over vents a bit to encourage the air sideways instead of upwards, but that's not brilliant. Any suggestions most welcome!! So in the worst case scenario, I put her down on her front and hear her yelling at me within a couple of minutes. I come back to find her with purple hands and a slimy face all covered in snot and baby chuck. The look she gives me is quite understandable and I clean her off and put her down on her back with a blanky, which isn't ideal but I figure is better than being stuck in a pram all day.
So to summarise, I need to take my vitamins, I need to be more organised and definitely need to be doing more of the mobility program.
So despite this.....
On Monday we had the handover from the Maternal and Child Health Nurse who has been coming to our house, a brilliant lady named Deb who has been watching Jacinta grow from about 8 weeks of age, to another brilliant lady named Pauline who doesn't come to our house but sits in her office, who we've known a few years and who first met Jacinta at 7 weeks and referred us to Deb.
It was such a lovely meeting, to which we arrived a good 10 minutes late of course, but since we all talk so fast it didn't really matter. Deb was so pleased with how Jacinta was doing, and how she was holding herself and bearing weight on her legs and giving kisses and putting on weight and growing nicely and being lovely and pink and just being no trouble at all and "sparkling" at Deb the whole time.
She's become so attached to Jacinta she says she feels like a grandmother and was just marvelling at everything that she's achieved and at how worried she was before her operation and how well she's doing now. She's very proud of her and may just accidentally happen to be driving by in the future and stop to say 'hello'.
Pauline gave her a weigh and a measure and was so impressed with her numbers (and I can't remember exactly what they were, but we've cracked the 6 kilos!) and where she's sitting on the chart and was remembering this little baby who came in with a nasogastric tube and breathing issues and not that pink at all really and seeing this healthy robust little chubba doing all these clever things and so alert, was really pleased.
In the end they ran out of housekeeping things to ask me. I told Pauline about the IAHP course and she liked the sound of it and since Deb was so interested in it I've said I'll bring in the book with the Institutes Development Profile in it so she can see it, which she's keen to do.
It's interesting that pretty much everything I've mentioned to her is something that 'they' now recommend - it seems the world is slowly catching up with the experts!
So, despite my ineptitude and disorganisation, things are happening. It's sometimes hard to see them going on day to day, but every time we do some of this:
It get us that little bit closer to our ultimate goal.
Now it's time for me to get my butt into gear and get organised so I can report back soon with excellent progress and maybe some better photos!!
(I'm usually too busy clapping and cheering to take pictures!)
I've got nearly half the cards made for the reading program too, so I'll start that soon and report back too.
See you all soon!!
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| Out at the shops, snug as a bug! |
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