In this hilarious, heartfelt book, Brian Leaf tackles parenting with a unique blend of research and humor.
Explored is Attachment Parenting, as well as Playful, Unconditional, Simplicity, and good old Dr. Spock parenting. He tries cloth diapers, no diapers, co-sleeping, and no sleeping. Join him on his rollicking journey in this one-of-a-kind parenting guide.
In this hilarious, heartfelt book, Brian Leaf tackles parenting with a unique blend of research and humor.
Explored is Attachment Parenting, as well as Playful, Unconditional, Simplicity, and good old Dr. Spock parenting. He tries cloth diapers, no diapers, co-sleeping, and no sleeping. Join him on his rollicking journey in this one-of-a-kind parenting guide.
Misadventures of a Parenting Yogi: Cloth Diapers, Cosleeping, and My (Sometimes Successful) Quest for Conscious Parenting
240
Misadventures of a Parenting Yogi: Cloth Diapers, Cosleeping, and My (Sometimes Successful) Quest for Conscious Parenting
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Overview
In this hilarious, heartfelt book, Brian Leaf tackles parenting with a unique blend of research and humor.
Explored is Attachment Parenting, as well as Playful, Unconditional, Simplicity, and good old Dr. Spock parenting. He tries cloth diapers, no diapers, co-sleeping, and no sleeping. Join him on his rollicking journey in this one-of-a-kind parenting guide.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781608682683 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | New World Library |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 642 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Misadventures of a Parenting Yogi
Cloth Diapers, Cosleeping, and My (Sometimes Successful) Quest for Conscious Parenting
By Brian Leaf
New World Library
Copyright © 2014 Brian LeafAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60868-268-3
CHAPTER 1
Before Babies
Parenting young children is not unlike serfdom.
Except that you're madly, wildly in love with your feudal lords.
As soon as the kids get a bit older you completely forget all this. You forget that for eight years you had given up eating sitting down and thinking clearly, and you start telling friends with younger children to "soak it in because it goes so fast."
These friends smile at you politely and probably know you're right, but secretly they want to grind their heel on your little toe. Just enough to cause you some pain but no serious damage.
By the time I wrote the last few chapters of this book, I too had forgotten all this. After reading that first draft, my editor, who has two young children, wanted to grind his heel on my toe. His comments contained words like smug, facile, and throw this book against the wall. Thankfully, he woke me up, and I revised the book. He reminded me that everyone except people with small children seems to know exactly how best to parent. It is much easier from the sidelines. But in the arena, it is just madness.
I had forgotten that when my boys were two and five, I felt ninety-seven years old. I remembered only the pure bliss of a bike ride together on a sunny, cloudless spring day. I forgot that for a few years, Gwen and I sat on different couches in the evening and mostly snapped at each other when we did speak.
It was not always like that, and it's not at all like that now between Gwen and me. It truly, as they say, gets better. Now we are on our honeymoon all over again.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
I met Gwen — twice — at the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts. The first time I thought she was much too good for me, which she is, so I didn't pay much attention to her. A really excellent strategy, I know.
The second time, two years later, I was visiting my yoga teacher, as I did every four weeks. On September 5, 2003, I left Januar's office on the third floor, walked down the hallway, and peeked into Vairaigya.
Vairaigya was the small closet of a room in which Kripalu's long-term volunteers stashed leftovers from Saturday night's chocolate cake, surfed the Internet on an Apple IIe computer, and swapped clothes — residents could take or leave their Mexican serapes, quilted shirts from a Dead tour, and used Birkenstocks.
And sitting at the computer was Gwen.
I had not seen Gwen since I had moved out of Kripalu two years earlier. Back then we had interacted only a few times and had exchanged maybe ten words. We had different jobs at the ashram. I washed dishes in the kitchen and she worked in grounds and maintenance — shoveling walks, painting, and using power tools.
I had always had a crush on her but considered her simply out of my league: she was radiant and Canadian and had worked back-country trail crew in Banff National Park.
But Gwen looked right at me and said, "Hi, Brian."
She knew my name! There was even a sparkle in her eye.
In my best Barry White, I replied, "Hey, Gwen. Wanna get some dinner together?"
To myself, though, I shrieked, "Holy shit, she knows my name. I think she likes me!"
We headed to the dining hall, flashed our name tags at the door greeter, gathered our trays of salad, pea soup, and mashed potatoes, and walked out to the patio overlooking the gorgeous Berkshire Mountains.
On any given night there are many more dinner dates happening at Kripalu than most people realize.
We sat together for hours until it was dark, and then we moved to an unoccupied yoga room — the typical second act for any Kripalu date. We talked there some more and then decided to walk in the dark to the lake.
We stopped at my car for a blanket and bumped into a mutual friend who still lived and worked at Kripalu. She eyed us and said, "Wow, two of my favorite people together. I didn't know you knew each other. Wait a minute. Are you in love?"
We blushed.
Before leaving to drive back to Northampton, I asked Gwen for her number. She wrote it down, smiled, planted a kiss on my cheek, and skipped back to the building. This is how Canadians are. Like in a continuous episode of Anne of Green Gables. To figure out the Canadian year, simply subtract fifty from the current year. Gwen was in 1953.
I don't believe in being coy or playing romantic games, so I called Gwen the next day. I invited her to dinner and a Ram Dass talk in Northampton. I'd make sushi before the talk.
Gwen showed up. And pretty much never left. We were inseparable. We hiked. We cooked organic meals. We did yoga and played strip Scrabble.
Gwen's contract at Banff National Park was over for the season, so in mid-October, she flew to Banff, packed up her car, and drove cross-country to move to Northampton.
I was a bit worried, though. Even under ideal circumstances, New England, or anywhere else in the world, would have a difficult time competing with Banff National Park's beauty and splendor. And I wanted Gwen to like Northampton. But late October, early November, is a particularly gray time in western Massachusetts. I'd have been far more confident of my chances in summer or during the white wonderland of January.
Despite the bare trees and gray-brown grass, Gwen stayed.
Later that month we traveled together to my friend Zach's wedding in Scottsdale, Arizona. I was going to propose during my best man toast, but Gwen just didn't seem ready. I know this because in our rental car en route from the airport to the tux shop, in casual conversation, Gwen said, "I'm just not ready." I stashed the diamond necklace in my coat pocket for the remaining six days of vacation.
One month later Gwen was ready, and on Christmas morning we got engaged. I had always wondered how I could one day have a wedding that would reflect my eclectic spiritual beliefs but not alienate my Jewish relatives from New Jersey. I needed a druid, a rabbi, and a swami to co-officiate. We settled for our environmentally conscious half-Jewish yoga teacher.
In fact, my family's expectations of me had changed after ten years of my nomadic yogic life spent ashram hopping, town hopping, and couch hopping. Now I think they were simply happy that I was getting married at all.
Plus, they were pleased that I wanted a fairly big wedding. Years earlier, my first Kripalu yoga teacher had given me some advice. Yolanthe had been married at sunset on a mountaintop in California in the 1970s. The ceremony was witnessed by only a few friends. They wore flower garlands and hippie dresses and were holding hands in a circle around the happy couple. (There were likely drugs involved.) Yolanthe and her husband divorced a few years later, and she had always wondered if a bigger, more involved wedding might have given them a better chance at staying married. Would more planning and ritual and support from friends and extended family have given them a more definitive start, a more grounded beginning? Would it have made them accountable to more people? Did they miss out on Great-Aunt Gertrude's scolding, "Divorce? But you just got married. And I flew in from Florida for the wedding. Out of the question."
I always remembered Yolanthe's advice. "Brian," she said in her Dutch accent that made everything sound like a military command, "Hev a beeg vedding! It gijh you a virm shtarting poynt. It shements your vouuuws!"
I could see what she meant. At my brother's wedding in 1994, I got to know my sister-in-law's family. I worked with her dad to transport the ketubah. We negotiated family photos for two very hungry hours. Decorating Larry and Pam's car, I bonded with their college friends. The wedding built community and lent gravity to Larry and Pam's vows.
Gwen and I were married under a giant oak tree. We wrote our own vows. We asked our community to participate. Our mothers lit a unity candle to symbolize the coming together of our families. Gwen's brother played keyboard, and her sister played cello. My friend Zach was emcee.
The reception was a blast. Though my gentile friends, in hoisting me up on a chair for the hora dance, seemed to misunderstand the tradition. They believed that their task was to buck me off — more Texas than Jewish. I held on for dear life. In the photos you can see the veins in my forehead as I clasp the chair. I think I left nail marks.
During the hora, things really heated up. The cooks from the local Blue Goose Café were preparing the feast and had a grease fire in the kitchen, which set off the fire alarm. My great aunt Litza was the first to hear it above the blaring "Hava Nagila."
Among more than one hundred family, friends, and guests dancing feverishly in concentric circles to "Uru ahim belev-sameachhh," in a voice as loud as her seventy-five-year-old lungs could muster, Litza began shouting, "This place is on fire!"
My aunt Sandy, straining to hear her, replied, "Yeah, I know. It's hopping!"
"No," Litza insisted. "It's really on fire!"
Sandy should have understood Litza's meaning immediately. Seventy-five-year-old Jewish ladies in floral print dresses do not speak like Venus Flytrap from WKRP in Cincinnati.
The folks from the Blue Goose doused the fire and moved their operations to barbecues outside. We feasted on local free-range chicken and organic heirloom tomatoes. For dessert we ate wedding cake made from spelt flour and Sucanat instead of white sugar.
Gwen and I decided to travel around the country for our honeymoon, and we budgeted for three weeks. All this was a terrible mistake. We spent most of our time getting out west, and by the time we made it, we had to turn around for home. Things start to look a little different once you pass the Great Lakes. Until then, you might as well have taken a joyride back and forth twenty-three times across northern New Jersey.
When we got home I made a collage of mementos for Gwen. It still hangs somewhere in the bowels of the basement.
CHAPTER 2Not Not Trying
After the honeymoon, I was reading Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods. I went to an outdoor store and bought a nice North Face ergonomic backpack and a light water bottle, and I started walking everywhere. I could take the hour and a half to walk somewhere that would take ten minutes in a car because I had the time.
One day I needed to take a check to the local newspaper for an advertisement, so I walked it over. I was exhilarated from the exercise, the fresh air, and my contribution to saving the planet. When I arrived, I sat in a chair beside the classified ad rep's cubicle to sign a paper and hand her the check. I was so excited to be there and to be alive and free.
I looked at her and said, "I just walked here from Florence!"
Silence.
"That's, like, four miles!"
Silence. She handed me a pen to sign my paperwork, eager to move on to the next sheet in her towering pile. Definitely a parent.
I, on the other hand, had unlimited time. Which was about to change.
Gwen and I had been married for six months, and we went for a routine visit to my Ayurvedic teacher in Boston. I was going to get a checkup and the potions for my yearly cleanse. It was difficult to leave this guy's office without a crate of decoctions, tinctures, and powders. But they worked. After every yearly cleanse, I felt more alert, creative, and vibrant than ever.
Gwen came along. I'd been seeing Farrukh for six years and we had become friends, and I wanted Gwen to meet him. Plus, she was interested in trying a cleanse.
I had my session first. He felt my Ayurvedic pulses. He looked at my tongue and my eyes. He asked me questions about my diet, the size of my bowel movements, and my sleep habits. And he prescribed a cleanse. I would drink three shakes a day and take a cocktail of herbal supplements to cleanse my liver and colon. I would eat from a prescribed diet of organic, simple, unprocessed foods. I'd avoid sugar and common food allergens such as wheat, dairy, and eggs. To give my body a break from its usual foods, he recommended a wide variety of low-mercury fish and prescribed rabbit and duck rather than chicken. I was excited. I knew I'd feel charged with energy.
Then it was Gwen's turn. She had been sitting next to me during my session, so we simply switched chairs. He took her pulses. He looked at her tongue and eyes. He asked her questions about her diet and sleep habits. I got to hear about her bowel movements.
Farrukh began tailoring a cleanse for Gwen, when, in passing, I mentioned that we might begin "trying" in a year or so. Farrukh stopped dead in his tracks. He went white and sweaty. As though visited from beyond, as though channeling, he told us that Gwen might not be able to get pregnant, and if she did, we would lose the fetus in the first trimester. He wanted her to have several hormone tests.
We stared ahead, pale and terrified, our stomachs in our shoes.
After the tests, which would cost four hundred dollars, we'd know more.
Gwen left with no cleanse.
We drove home in silence.
Finally, Gwen spoke. Her words woke us from our terror. "Wait a minute. What's he talking about? We don't know if there's really any problem."
"Right. What if he's wrong?" We were regaining our footing, soothing ourselves. We reached out for our previous reality, the one that did not include any terror of miscarriages and infertility.
"What if we just stop using birth control, and see what happens. We can do the hormone tests later if needed."
I agreed. We had not been planning on trying for another year anyway, so there was no rush. We decided to see what would happen before we dove into a cascade of interventions, even if the cascade consisted of holistic tests and natural treatments. After all, Gwen was in terrific health. She could climb mountains in a single Canadian bound. She could handle a chain saw and she ate brown rice and chard with eager gusto. Surely she was vibrantly healthy.
So we stopped not trying.
We went on official record with friends. If Facebook had existed back then, we'd have switched our birthing status from not trying to not not trying. We worried there might be some truth to Farrukh's fears and were not quite ready to commit to the actual designation of trying.
And back then, before we had kids, we didn't not try quite a bit. We didn't not try in the den. We'd not not try before a movie, during a movie, after the movie, in the kitchen, on the bed, under the bed. We not not tried with the zeal of newlyweds.
And all that not not trying paid off. Quickly. I actually know when we conceived. I had a feeling. And several days later Gwen was sure. She could feel the changes in her body. On a trip home to Northampton after visiting my parents in New Jersey, we stopped at a CVS and bought three pregnancy tests. One long pee later, we had three plus signs.
CHAPTER 3A Squirrel in Our Bed
We were still worried about Farrukh's predictions, so we waited to tell friends and family. But when we confided in our one friend who was already a mom, she said, "Why wait? Tell people that you'd want to know if you were to lose the baby. You'd need their love and support. Why be isolated and alone?"
She was right, so we shared the news. And we waited together.
The first trimester passed. Gwen was healthy.
She was nauseous in the mornings. But she found that she just needed to stay well fed. If she ate small snacks all day, she was fine. I'd wake up at three in the morning in a start, thinking, "What's that noise?" Just as I was jumping up to fetch a broom to shoo the squirrel from our bed, I'd realize, "Oh, that's just Gwen propped up on three pillows and munching saltines in the dark."
A few weeks into the second trimester, we were confident enough to tour midwives in the area. Actually, first we toured the hospital. It was very nice and even had rooms with tubs for water births, but it was cold and sterile and we really wanted our baby to be born at home.
If you contemplate a home birth, everyone you know, from your mother to your mechanic, will ask, "But isn't home birth unsafe and totally insane?"
I don't think it is. In fact, if we look historically, home birth has been practiced in 99.999 percent of the births since humans began walking upright. Jimmy Carter was actually the first US president not to be born at home.
But what about safety?
In the UK, the very reputable National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence reports that mortality during home births is the same as it is for hospital births. And Holland reports that a home birth led by a midwife "does not increase the risks of mortality among low-risk women." These Dutch know what they are talking about; in Holland, 30 percent of births occur at home.
The same report goes on to state that there is equality between home birth and hospital birth "provided the maternity care system facilitates this choice through the availability of well-trained midwives and through a good transportation and referral system." Translation: Home birth is great, as long as midwives are skilled and it's easy to get into the hospital when needed.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Misadventures of a Parenting Yogi by Brian Leaf. Copyright © 2014 Brian Leaf. Excerpted by permission of New World Library.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Author's Note,Preface: Lox 'n Latkes,
Chapter 1. Before Babies,
Chapter 2. Not Not Trying,
Chapter 3. A Squirrel in Our Bed,
Chapter 4. Birthing Class,
Chapter 5. Six Days of Labor,
Chapter 6. Thanksgiving,
Chapter 7. The Phlebotomist,
Chapter 8. Sweet Baby Lemongelo,
Chapter 9. The Myth of Smegma,
Chapter 10. The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding,
Chapter 11. Attachment Parenting,
Chapter 12. Say Good-Bye to Your Luscious Down Comforter,
Chapter 13. Get Help!,
Chapter 14. What Is This, 1850?,
Chapter 15. My Osteopathic Shaman,
Chapter 16. The Vulcan Baby Grip,
Chapter 17. The Perfect Parent,
Chapter 18. Punished by Rewards,
Chapter 19. The Christmas Dreidel,
Chapter 20. Kids' Yoga,
Chapter 21. Hypnobirthing,
Chapter 22. Never Argue with a Woman in Labor,
Chapter 23. Greased Lightning,
Chapter 24. Kids' Korner,
Chapter 25. Operation Meditation,
Chapter 26. Elimination Communication,
Chapter 27. Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?,
Chapter 28. Get Me a Beer,
Chapter 29. It's Not Personal,
Chapter 30. Playful Parenting,
Chapter 31. Kohn Meet Cohen,
Chapter 32. How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk,
Chapter 33. Poop,
Chapter 34. Divorce,
Chapter 35. Germophobia,
Chapter 36. Simplicity Parenting,
Chapter 37. Sex,
Chapter 38. Meditation,
Chapter 39. Ayurveda,
Chapter 40. Never Skip Lunch,
Chapter 41. Choosing a School,
Chapter 42. Free-Range Parenting,
Chapter 43. CTFD,
Epilogue: Be Loved,
Acknowledgments,
Ayurvedic Constitutional Survey and Recommendations,
Reading Group Guide,
About the Author,