Unschooling Vs. School -- a teen's experience

I just wanted to post a shout-out to this blog I read today from a teenager who has written about his experience going to school for the first time (as a ninth grader) after unschooling the previous 8 years or so. He sounds like a really cool person, and is a great writer. He talks about his firsthand experience with loss of motivation caused by going to school, and about how easy it was for him. It confirmed my experience that most of what I learned I learned outside of school.

"Why I Don't Support the Troops"

This letter from a reader of the Berkeley Planet newspaper got me to thinking about how I feel about the military. I see all the time those yellow ribbon things saying "support the troops" and remember even peace activists saying "support our troops by bringing them home." I have never felt that way. I just realized that the reason that I didn't like the strategy of saying that you can support the people in the military and at the same time not support war is that I think that anyone who is in the military has signed up to participate in war. How is this any better than becoming a gang member and shooting other gang members? I know that there are people who feel that the military is a way out of poverty, but there are other, more constructive ways. I support anyone who is willing to work for peace, and that does not include soldiers. If you want to use a gun, take up target shooting or something.

Things that bug me

These are things that bug me constantly, bouncing around in my head and torturing me incessantly. I hope that writing them down will help get them out of there, because some days I just want to whack them out!

1. My son has no sibling. I never thought I would raise a child without a sibling, but that's how it's worked out. I grieve for the sibling he has never had. I am constantly envious of anyone I know who has more than one child -- even strangers on the street. I spend a lot of my time thinking about how it sucks to be "fertility challenged" and getting too old to even see the reproductive endocrinologist. I am consumed with self-hatred for bringing a child into the world without any workable plan to give him a sibling (such as doing IVF instead back then and freezing some embryos to save for a sibling). I spend much of my time researching (fruitlessly so far) a cure for PCOS. I am simply miserable that I've had no luck (and had a miscarriage recently to boot).

2. My son will never know his maternal grandparents, and I do not have my mom to help out, talk to, back me up. I feel incredibly lonely and abandoned without her here. I am insanely envious of people who have their parents, and especially resent them complaining about them when they have no idea how hard it is to parent your child with no parents of your own to turn to (even if they may interfere too much, it's still something, love or whatever, for the child). I was recently at a birthday party where the birthday child had not only both his grandmothers there, but also two of his great-grandmothers. I was again, so consumed with envy, and angry for my son. My son will never ever have that. He's met his paternal grandmother, who is quite ill, once in his life, for a few days, which he barely remembers, and she is really quite out of it at this point. She hasn't even sent him so much as a frigging birthday card since he was a baby. I hate it that it angers me to see grandmothers doting on their grandchildren. I'm not angry at them, I'm angry at myself for having a kid knowing he'd never have that. And angry for him, and sad for him, that he won't have that extra love in his life. And angry at my mom for dying. And angry at myself for not doing more for her when she was alive so that maybe she would have lived. I feel overwhelmed that he's only got one generation, not two or three, to love him. Nobody who has their parents still alive can possibly understand how crappy it is. And I don't actually know anyone else who is in this position.

3. We live in an apartment. There are good things about it, like lots of other kids (although some of them are mean), but mostly it sucks. I hate it that we can't walk out our door and still feel at home. I hate it that we have nowhere to grow things. I'm so jealous of all the moms I meet who have homes. I hate myself for being jealous. I never expected to raise a child in such a place. It feels very wrong to me. But housing here is too expensive for any other options. Unless I go to work and put my son in daycare and full day kindergarten, which I hear is a nightmare. I feel trapped.

4. My son has terrible teeth. I don't even know how many fillings he's had now, there are so many. I hate that. And I have no idea what to do about it. I hate that.

Co-Sleeping is Safe

I wanted everyone to know that I co-sleep with my five year old son, and I have since he was a newborn baby. In fact, he and I have never slept apart in the entire time he has been alive. I know it's safe. Millions of families around the world know it's safe and have co-slept for millennia. Yet, there are forces out there who want people to believe that it is not safe so that they can sell more stuff -- cribs, cradles, bassinets, and of course bottles (since forcing your baby to sleep in another room makes breastfeeding a lot harder, and often pushes women to use bottles and formula to make the baby "sleep through the night"). The crib and formula manufacturers are colluding with the government and the medical establishment to try to outlaw co-sleeping.

If you have co-slept, please do this survey to help support safe co-sleeping.

Autism is Reversible!!

There's a movie called "Autism Yesterday" out that they showed at a local Unitarian Church here recently -- I didn't see it, but I did look at the trailer. It talked about the environmental causes for autism (vaccines, toxics, etc.), and apparently talked about some of the folks who have found that their children no longer showed signs of autism after various alternative treatments (diets, detox, etc.). I am interested but skeptical. I wonder if it's available free somewhere? I'm not paying $20.00 to be sold some supplements by some company. But maybe Generation Rescue, the maker of the movie, really is just a group of concerned parents (as their website states they are). They do have Jenny McCarthy on their side. And I do know people who have reversed their children's autism spectrum disorders with diets, supplements, or a combination of things. Amazing are the moms who have gone through multiple treatment plans and finally gotten their kids healthy enough that they can eat a semi-normal diet without any problems.

Gluten Intolerance

I still don't know if I have true gluten intolerance but I've been avoiding it 100% lately anyway just in case, since DS's and my dental problems have gotten worse again, and there's the fertility problem that has always haunted me. Neither he nor I were ever officially diagnosed with anything, but I have suspected gluten, diary, and salicylates (and amines) for quite a while. DS won't comply 100% with gluten-free -- at least not when we're at other people's places where it is served. I ran into this blog entry about sourdough bread being OK for people who are gluten intolerant, and it intrigued me. Perhaps I could make some and bring it along (brown rice bread is kinda icky):

We have been doing bone broth for a couple of years now, but have been less consistent the past few months. Soups are nice but ds doesn't always want them (although if I bring a thermos of soup along, he generally will eat some of it).
I was actually making sourdough spelt bread (supposedly the gluten in spelt is easier to break down through fermentation than the glutens in wheat), but then got lazy and started buying sourdough spelt, and then started buying regular spelt.

Our main symptom is tooth decay, which is pretty hard to observe unless you are a dentist, but it's pretty obvious something we were doing was wrong, because now ds has to have an abscessed tooth pulled (making him minus five teeth!). We have gone back to 100% gluten free, but I'm not convinced it was enough. The only time we halted the tooth decay was on the Specific Carbohydrate Diet (SCD), a super difficult diet based on an old diet for celiacs that has been replaced by the gluten free diet for the most part.

There are still some celiacs that have found that gluten-free wasn't enough to give them gut healing, and they are on SCD. But most people on SCD are people with Crohn's disease, colitis, or autism. It is similar to the paleo diet, which eliminates all grains, beans, dairy, sugar, and "farmed" foods, but it allows some beans (later in the diet) and doesn't allow many root vegetables (except beets, onions, carrots, and ginger). I think what worked with us was the lack of sugar and starches, both of which are hard on the teeth, but I'm not sure, because it allowed some dried fruit and those are also supposedly hard on the teeth. It also doesn't allow any canned vegetables, and only fruits canned in their own juice (i.e. pineapple), which generally isn't a problem for us except sometimes I use canned beans. Big no-no on SCD, and really they do cause gas and reflux for me. Anyway, I am waiting to see if removing the gluten will halt tooth decay before doing anything further (and really, it's pretty much impossible to eliminate everything we're both sensitive to and also do SCD).

What exactly is normal, anyway?

I grew up in a very odd family, so I never had any misconception that I was normal. We had neighbors who were fairly normal, although their youngest son was born with all kinds of birth defects due to his mom having had German measles when he was a baby. They were God-fearing Christians, which is what all normal people were in my hometown. The dad worked, the mom stayed at home and kept the house clean and all of them very well fed (the parents were rather overweight, although both boys were fairly slim -- it was the daughter who gained the weight, as usual). The dad had a workshop and was always fixing something or renovating something. They sang hymns at their organ, prayed before meals, and got a spanking if they misbehaved. We lived in a dirty house, were Unitarian, and were never punished for anything. Also, our place was definitely not being kept up and my dad's main hobby was reading. I always felt like they were the normal family, and we were the freaks. This was confirmed for me when I started school in the first grade (my mom had created her own Montessori Pre-K/Kindergarten for me just so I could start a year earlier than Kindergarten).

In the first grade, I discovered that most of my classmates had been saved (which I still don't quite understand but it has something to do with telling your church you believe Christ is your personal savior). Also, I was about the only girl who never wore dresses (I had refused once because I felt a bit vulnerable without pants on, and my mother never tried to get me into a dress again), the only white girl with short hair (there were only like two other white girls in the class, all the rest were African American), the only one who had a mom over 30 (they used to ask me if she was my granny, since she was probably the same age as most of theirs). I was one of two or three who started out already knowing how to read and write, but that wasn't really an issue. My clothes, bought in the boy's department at JC Penney or sometimes hand made by my mother (which got me picked on), were more of an issue, as was my lack of wearing underwear (my mom never wore it so she never thought to buy it for us kids).

Then, when I was 10 or 11, my father, who had started to drink and have rages, quit working because his pain disorder, which was at the time undiagnosed but later would be known to be fibrocitis or fibromyalgia, was preventing him from doing his job. He really got a lot worse after that, what with drinking more and more vodka (the doctor he was seeing actually suggested he start drinking to help with the pain, since the pain medications that he'd tried didn't help). We were on food stamps for awhile because we no longer had much of an income what with my mom having been a stay at home mom for 18 years at that point. She applied for benefits, and got us on Social Security Disability with a lot of fighting, I'm sure.

That just set us apart more. A drunk, disabled dad and a mom who was going back to school to try to start supporting the family is not something most people experience. I used to lie (my mom started it actually) and tell people my dad was still a professor when in fact he spent most of his time lying around drunk or walking to the liquor store (my mom refused to buy it and wouldn't let him drive anymore). I had already been picked on for my clothes, and how incredibly messy our home was (especially my room -- at one point it was like three feet deep in old toys and clothes, with just a path to the bed), now there was no way I could have anyone over, risking that they see my dad, who usually wore nothing but a pair of boxer shorts and a blue bathrobe (which he often neglected to tie shut), staggering around or falling down and thrashing around in all the empty vodka bottles.

So I had no real friends. Sure, my mother got me into a special gifted program that allowed me to switch elementary schools. I was still the same weird kid, even among some nerds who were definitely not as weird as I was. Anyway, not long after, a couple of kids from my old school came too, and told about the time one of our classmates had come home with me and seen my house and described it to everyone). There were several charitable good Christian girls who took pity on me, particularly one named Lee, who always included me in her sleepovers and such, which made me feel a bit better, but I was never myself around those kids. I knew if any of these kids got to know who I was, they would not like me, and would again pick on me. I could never have a party or sleepover at my place, so I was always the guest, and I think they knew something must be wrong. So they always kept their distance, too.

Fast forward a few years to tenth grade. I went on a diet of some sort, lost a few pounds, and started seeking out boys. I had been attracted to this one boy, Steve Nation, but I was not really his type -- he preferred smaller girls with dark hair (I had light brown hair and was always one of the tallest girls in my class). He had a friend, Manuel, who I thought was cute, too, but he never asked me out. Then, we had a square dancing segment in our gym class, and my square dancing partner, another Steve (not the same one), asked me out. He said something about taking me to a video game place, which I'd only been to like once before (this was long before XBox or even Nintendo, so going to an arcade was really the only way to play video games). So I said yes, even though I didn't find him in the least bit attractive.

On our "date" if you could call it that, instead of taking me to the arcade he drove out to this undeveloped, woodsy part of town (it's probably underneath a mall now), and took my virginity. I didn't really enjoy it, but thought it was cool anyway since I thought all the cool kids were having sex (some of them were but not as many as I thought then, I'm sure). The next day, I told all kinds of people about it, which alienated me from the charitable Christian girls even more, and made Steve pretty mad too (but he had already totally ignored me in front of the school before I'd ever said anything to anyone). Now I was not only weird, I was also a slut to boot! Boy, what mess!

Later, during the summer, I was involved in even more crazy stuff, including having a sexual experience with a boy (younger than me by at least a couple of years) my best friend had just lost her virginity to, being "gang banged" while so drunk that I blacked out everything (and later puked all over the place), being used sexually by the boarding boys at a prominent boys' school nearby, and being escorted home by the police in the middle of the night. Definitely not an Honor Roll student sort of thing, even though I was on the honor roll. I would have been the valedictorian of my high school by the way had they not fudged the numbers, and even then I still got to be the salutatorian (I wish I'd made a speech condemning the whole system, but at the time I thought they were just trying to be fair to the other kids, since most of my grades were from another school where Advanced Placement classes gave you 5 points for an A and 4 points for a B).

Oh, about that best friend. I met Stacy at my church, the UU church (which is kind of a liberal, Protestant, intellectual church), and we started hanging out not long before I lot my virginity. I first spent the night at her house when I got dumped by a boy who lived near her, and we spent almost the whole summer that year together, usually at her house or out in some boy's place or in the back of a car or whatever. She accepted me. For the first time in my life, I felt a connection to someone who liked me just the way I was. It was amazing. I still am amazed, really, because I still have all that self-doubt and self-hatred buried inside me, and I still have a really really hard time believing anyone can really like me. But I am so glad I finally found a friend. All those years, 15, with no friends, were so hard, then you, Stacy, came along and showed me that I could be me without worrying about whether people were going to hate me or not. Thank you.
But I still don't know what normal means, unless it means not having a personality. It seems like everyone I meet who I get to know has some oddness in them. Do I attract them or is everyone a little weird?

Public School Beef recall

This is just too gross:

Cafeterias in Seattle elementary schools will serve waffles and scrambled eggs on Tuesday instead of waffles and sausage. For lunch Thursday, mu shu chicken will replace mu shu beef.

To be safe, school officials won't serve any beef until they learn more about the U.S. Department of Agriculture's investigation into allegations that a large supplier of beef to the national school-lunch program used meat from "downer" cows — those that cannot stand or walk.

...

The concern arose after the release of a video that shows slaughterhouse workers at Hallmark Meat Packing using forklifts to prod or move animals. Westland Meat, which grinds meat, gets meat from Hallmark.

The video, produced by the Humane Society of the United States, raised concerns about animal cruelty and whether meat from "downer" cows is being used in school lunches.

No health problems from Westland meat have been reported. But nonambulatory cows may have a higher risk of being infected with mad-cow disease, E. coli and salmonella, according to the Humane Society.

Salt caves for health

This article says that people are going to salt caves to breathe the salt air to heal themselves. I remember people used to go to the seaside to get healed from various illnesses (tuberculosis, etc.). Is this the same idea? That salt air is healing? Seems odd. I'd much rather sit on the beach than in a cave, salt or otherwise.

Joys and Sorrows

At the local Unitarian Church (one of the three that is 20 minutes or so away), there is a time for sharing joys and sorrows, when people can stand up in front of the congregation, speak about something (or more than one thing) that brings them joy or sorrow (or some of each), and light a candle (or two). I have only done it once, and that one time was mostly because C wanted a chance to light a candle (or to see me do it, rather). I think I lit it for my brother Charlie, but I'm not sure. Anyway, I'd like to post a bit of a joy and a bit of sorrow today.

My joy is that I really am enjoying my Christmas gifts this year -- my husband gave me a gift certificate to a local bookstore that sells crystals and cool books, and also one for a spa. I'd been asking for them for awhile, but finally he gets it that I don't want stuff so much as experiences. Plus, I can't exactly return a gift certificate, LOL (I'm pretty bad about returning things). I loved the spa treatment I got, and I've gotten a beautiful rose quartz pendant that I still have to find the right necklace for. The silver chain I have that I like the length of seems to give me a rash (as so much metal does). I'm thinking maybe a ribbon would be nice?

My sorrow is that my brother's mother-in-law just died of cancer. I didn't know her well, but it's sad that his kids now have no grandparents living (C has only one, so he's almost as bad off). She died of lung cancer, despite the fact that she'd quit smoking years ago (once a smoker, always a lung cancer risk, apparently). She had been ill for quite some time, and had actually outlived the doctor's prediction by six months. But regardless, I feel bad for my brother and his kids, and understand that his wife is pretty bummed out about it. Also, it brought up a couple of things -- my missing my mom (it doesn't get better with years, that was a lie), and also the fact that his wife is a total witch and I can't really feel much sympathy for her. I am jealous that she got to be almost 50 before her mom died, mine died when I was 30. Is that selfish? I don't know, but my blaming her for my mom's death sure didn't bring my mom back. All it did was lose me my brother.

More Peace Quotes

I'm not up for writing a lot about myself but I love to write what others say:

"I like to believe that ordinary people in the long run are going
to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed,
I think that people will want peace so much that one of these
days governments had better get out of the way and let them
have it."

~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

The Japanese Way of Health

The Japanese live longer than Americans (although only by 4 years on average), despite drinking and smoking heavily. There are all kinds of theories about this. Here's an article saying it's their diet that is the key. They eat fish, lots of veggies, fruits, and rice, and not a lot of red meat or dairy. But of course, there is no way to tell for sure, despite all the numbers. It might be something else entirely.

Fairy and Human Relations Congress

There is going to be a meeting of the Fairy and Human Relations Congress this summer a bit north of here in the North Cascades, near the border of Washington and Canada. They are a group of people who believe they can communicate with fairies and other spiritual beings they refer to as devas. Apparently they meet regularly, and have writings about their experiences. The main purpose of their gathering is to promote peace on earth and to improve relationships between humans and fairies (and other spiritual beings). I have never personally communicated with fairies. I say anything to promote peace is pretty cool. My friend Stacy pointed out, however, that they charge money and still expect you to work. And she says that they are wrong that you have to go to the congress to experience fairy love. Perhaps a visit to a rainbow gathering, which is free to my best recollection, would be a better way to get together with alternative types. If that's what you enjoy, that is. A large number of people in the woods can be kind of weird, and sanitation is a real concern (when I went to a Rainbow Gathering, I got a nasty case of diarrhea and a nasty cold out of it).

Native American Profecy

I think the subtitles are either German or Swedish.

Lakota Nation Secedes from United States

This is huge! Link

Descendants of Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse break away from US

December 20, 2007

WASHINGTON (AFP) — The Lakota Indians, who gave the world legendary warriors Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, have withdrawn from treaties with the United States, leaders said Wednesday.

"We are no longer citizens of the United States of America and all those who live in the five-state area that encompasses our country are free to join us," long-time Indian rights activist Russell Means told a handful of reporters and a delegation from the Bolivian embassy, gathered in a church in a run-down neighborhood of Washington for a news conference.

A delegation of Lakota leaders delivered a message to the State Department on Monday, announcing they were unilaterally withdrawing from treaties they signed with the federal government of the United States, some of them more than 150 years old.

They also visited the Bolivian, Chilean, South African and Venezuelan embassies, and will continue on their diplomatic mission and take it overseas in the coming weeks and months, they told the news conference.

Lakota country includes parts of the states of Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming.

The new country would issue its own passports and driving licences, and living there would be tax-free -- provided residents renounce their US citizenship, Means said.

The treaties signed with the United States are merely "worthless words on worthless paper," the Lakota freedom activists say on their website.

The treaties have been "repeatedly violated in order to steal our culture, our land and our ability to maintain our way of life," the reborn freedom movement says.

Withdrawing from the treaties was entirely legal, Means said.

"This is according to the laws of the United States, specifically article six of the constitution," which states that treaties are the supreme law of the land, he said.

"It is also within the laws on treaties passed at the Vienna Convention and put into effect by the US and the rest of the international community in 1980. We are legally within our rights to be free and independent," said Means.

The Lakota relaunched their journey to freedom in 1974, when they drafted a declaration of continuing independence -- an overt play on the title of the United States' Declaration of Independence from England.

Thirty-three years have elapsed since then because "it takes critical mass to combat colonialism and we wanted to make sure that all our ducks were in a row," Means said.

One duck moved into place in September, when the United Nations adopted a non-binding declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples -- despite opposition from the United States, which said it clashed with its own laws.

"We have 33 treaties with the United States that they have not lived by. They continue to take our land, our water, our children," Phyllis Young, who helped organize the first international conference on indigenous rights in Geneva in 1977, told the news conference.

The US "annexation" of native American land has resulted in once proud tribes such as the Lakota becoming mere "facsimiles of white people," said Means.

Oppression at the hands of the US government has taken its toll on the Lakota, whose men have one of the shortest life expectancies -- less than 44 years -- in the world.

Lakota teen suicides are 150 percent above the norm for the United States; infant mortality is five times higher than the US average; and unemployment is rife, according to the Lakota freedom movement's website.

"Our people want to live, not just survive or crawl and be mascots," said Young.

"We are not trying to embarrass the United States. We are here to continue the struggle for our children and grandchildren," she said, predicting that the battle would not be won in her lifetime.

On Peace

In this season when so many are wishing for peace, or at least wishing each other peace, I thought it might be nice to post some quotes about peace:

The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes from within the souls of men when they realize their relationship, their oneness, with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize that at the center of the universe dwells Wakan-Tanka, and that this center is really everywhere, it is within each of us. This is the real peace, and the others are but reflections of this. The second peace is that which is made between two individuals, and the third is that which is made between two nations. But above all you should understand that there can never be peace between nations until there is first known that true peace which is within the souls of men.
-Black Elk, Oglala Lakota Spiritual Leader (1863 - 1950)

True peace is not merely the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice.
- Martin Luther King Jr.

Short-circuiting the long-established principles of patient negotiation leads to war, not peace.
- Jimmy Carter

Each one has to find his peace from within. And peace to be real must be unaffected by outside circumstances.

-- and

If we are to teach real peace in this world, and if we are to carry on a real war against war, we shall have to begin with the children.
- Mohandas Gandhi

Peace is not something you wish for; It's something you make, Something you do, Something you are, And something you give away.
- Robert Fulghum

When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.
- Jimi Hendrix

Books about ob/gyn care in the US

In case you were wondering, yes, these books point out that we have a pretty high maternal death rate, and infant death rate, for a developed country. Most wealthy countries do far better with less money.

By Hook or By Crook film clip

This came out a few years ago (before C was born). My good friend Carina has a major part in it so I couldn't help wanting to put it up:

Snow!

It snowed last night, melted, then snowed again today! It's quite beautiful, but I'm glad I'm not trying to drive around in it. It's pretty chilly, too. This is the earliest it's snowed up here since we moved here a bit over three years ago. It had been feeling like it was going to snow for several days, but it was still a bit of a surprise to wake up to a snow-covered world. It was too cold to make a snow-person, and anyway in an apartment, where would it go?