Tomorrow I turn 40, in what a world!

I am so amazed that I'm going to be 40 years old tomorrow! Time has truly flown by. It seems like just yesterday that I was in college, but it's been over 15 years. How does it happen? What have I done with my life so far? The best thing I've done lately is to try to raise my son with gentle guidance and love, but sometimes it's so hard. He is so strong-willed!

Stop the madness -- King George, our formula feeding culture and all!
I am so amazed, too, at what a world we live in today. We have a president who believes in "Intelligent Design" -- which is just creationism in another form. We are at war over oil, again! We are a nation of SUV driving junk food eaters. Consumption is the name of the game, the entire basis for our economy. We have a food industry that is built on providing junk to millions for a huge profit, and an infrastructure that supports it. To cook your own foods from scratch is an act of rebellion, as is feeding your baby with your own breastmilk (now they're even going to start marketing women's breastmilk!).

I saw a woman today, who had a baby and a preschool girl, who was clearly a stay-at-home mom, bottle feeding the baby. Why? I mean, there's a chance she's had a double mastectomy or is on some rare, dangerous medication, but the mostly likely reason she's bottle feeding that baby is because that's what everyone else does, like the formula/pharmaceutical companies want us to. She was probably led to believe that formula is just as good as breast milk, that nursing in public is rude, that her breasts are sex objects not providors of nourishment, etc. How sad! He was/is being deprived of his birthright. I noticed he had a runny nose -- I would bet if he was breastfed he wouldn't have gotten sick, ds got only one cold his whole first year.

Dental problems -- why?
Yet, I'm sure if she got a good look at ds's missing front teeth, she felt a bit of pity for him.
Which brings me to his teeth -- why are they so rotten? We brush his teeth often now. He's never eaten a lot of sugar or drunk a lot of juice, and he wasn't bottle fed -- only breastmilk for the first six months except for a stupid attempt at rice cereal when he was four months. I'm thinking it was the grains, or maybe I didn't consume enough calcium when I was pregnant with him, or something else entirely. I am sure all the processed foods I ate while pregnant (mostly vegetarian frozen entrees) didn't help things, and the metformin the first trimester, and the prozac during a lot of my pregnancy and early in my postpartum period didn't help. I should have been eating a balanced, varied diet of homecooked foods when I was pregnant, but I didn't know. And now poor ds is the one to pay for it!

Those creepy agroindustrial junk food pushers!
The food industry fooled me into thinking it could feed me easier and more conveniently than I could do for myself. Sigh. And now that I am cooking from scratch, it is very very time-consuming, but at least part of that is because I'm out of practice and never been very good at planning meals, much less freezing them for later. I am going to try to continue on the SCD plan for another couple of months, especially since the other day when I ate bread I really felt sick. Even after we go off, which we will eventually, I really don't want to go back to eating processed and mass produced foods again.

Now for a little bit of positive
I just realized that almost all of my posts have been complaints, negative stuff. I would like to add a bit of sunshine to this post, anyway. I love to cook, I love salad, watercress, yogurt, lamb (yes, lamb -- no more am I a veggie!), and going for walks in the woods. I also love my wonderful husband and gorgeous son.