No Amber Alert issued when you've an MD

Many of you chose to birth at home with a midwife because you wanted to make your own decisions regarding your child's healthcare. Many of you went on to make decisions regarding immunizations and other health issues outside of what the culture of medicine would want for your child.
Riley's mother is trying to do the same thing you were doing. She has done good research to make an informed choice. She has tried to communicate and cooperate with the physicians who have been caring for Riley. In a last resort desperate action she chose to take Riley from the custody of the hospital to protect him from the surgery that she could not agree with.
A group of women have come together to provide Riley's mother, Tina with the support she needs to continue to exert her rights as a parent, to make the decisions she feel is best for her baby.

Tina Carlsen, Riley Roger's mother, was on the Dave Ross show this morning on Kiro 710, while her baby was being cut open at Seattle Children's. She describes being apprehended in Yelm.... "Get down or I will f*(ing blow a hole in your head." is what the police shouted at her four times. I was a caller on the show, and I heard her voice through my phone. I don't think this is something I am ever going to forget.

After his birth, Carlsen was given three weeks to enjoy her newborn before he surely would die. Instead, she has worked tirelessly to make sure her son would live, and now he is thriving in spite of his kidneys. She has investigated treatments, standards of care and has worked with her son's drs to determine the best course of action for her son. They disagreed about the necessity of surgery that would allow them to quickly do dialysis on the baby should it come to that. When Carlsen chose not to have the surgery performed on her son, they called CPS on her and said she was endangering his life.

Now this baby is under the knife for a surgery his parents don't want for him. A surgery after which he will get to be with his mother only TWO HOURS, and that after a Tacoma judge interceded and ordered it. How can these assholes justify that? This is a baby who nurses... he's only 9 months old!

It is now all coming out in the wash... the Amber Alert was wrong.
If you follow the links in progression, it shows more and more over time how they all over-reacted, and are starting to say so. The surgery is not to save his life, but to implement a "standard of care," a nice way of saying plug-and-play medicine. If this is your illness, then you get x, y and z done to you regardless of whether it's evidence-based or exactly appropriate to your situation.

At this time Carlsen has been released, and now they are deciding whether to drop the kidnapping charges. Who lied? Who said that the surgery was life saving? Who told CPS, the Press, the highway patrol, that the child would die because his mother "kidnapped" him. She is 34. I am 35. They stole her child. They can steal mine.

This is one ring into which I am definitely tossing my hat. You can't be a mother for long and not know people who have children with serious issues. Cancer, mental challenges, failure to thrive, anything. What happens when you disagree with your provider and that provider is one of the physicians who thinks Father Knows Best? What happens when you finally decide "that's enough chemo, enough feeding tubes, enough torture."

Most parents love their children to desperation. Most people who decide "thanks, but no thanks" to the places like children's hospital are doing so because they can provide better care for their children. This institution ran a smear campaign against this woman and literally took her nursling from her at gunpoint. They then kept him secreted away from not only Mom, but Dad, grandparents, everyone he knew and loved, playing the media and the law enforcement agencies as patsies along the way.

I thought in Washington, we'd be safe from shit like this.

I called into the radio show and I have written the Governor's office. I will be writing the newspapers and contacting Cantwell, as well.

oh yeah baby

Wow. Wow. Wow.

Some things need no further comment from me.

Farmin

So the kids and I didn't seem to want to leave our house today, because it was just not hot as hell inside. I even tried to get out of going to the farm, but when I called him P-Daddy was still in Seattle and didn't think he could make pickup on time.

I will type that again... sigh... P-Daddy was in Seattle. We (well 4/5 of us) love Seattle. It was either that or Northwest Glory Harbor for our domicile, and since the wage-earning 1/5 of us despises urban living, here we are! That, and the nasty ass commute. I totally support living where we do but alas I love Seattle. But I digress.

So the farm; well it was still hot as hell OUTSIDE so the farm was toasty when we got there at 3.30. I piled the share into the laundry hamper and the kids scampered about like the little rabbits they are. Farmer T is really into kids so it is nice, to be able to go to a place where the kids are welcomed and encouraged to explore. While I helped install paths in the children's garden, G made potato prints and communed with the adolescent chickens and D went belly-swimming in the freshly turned field. The soil there is like baby powder. I don't know why I think I can ever just go there and come home, much less clean.

As I was thinking we were making our break for it, G asked Farmer T if she could "go pick a strawberry to eat." Farmer T responded by handing her a pint box and telling her to have fun. When N, coming back from his potato stamping, saw G's box then he wanted to go pick. So we spent another 30 minutes in the fields (and yes it was hot as hell.)

Still, that's really cool. This CSA is valuable to us on so many different levels, and the educational benefits for the kids are just huge. They're going to a farm and getting the experiential learning, but they have the added benefit of doing this over time. They've seen the chickens sitting on their eggs, and they've fed them and watched them grow from the moment they hatched. They watch the bees soar to the berries and back to the hive again, and they sweeten their tea and oats with that honey. They've seen the hoophouses nurture seedlings and haybale mazes, and they've seen those same hoophouses topple in a winter storm. They've seen the fields flood, but they've seen how the farm rebounds from disasters such as those. They're watching their mother and her adult friends volunteer. They're learning life cycles, which is what one would expect, but they're also being versed in community and resiliency.

In unrelated news, I washed one of the school mats with a load of children's clothes. The mat was a red woven fabric... with a very strong dye. For the first time in my life I dyed an entire load of clothes hot pink. Sigh. I washed them again, I soaked them in oxiclean. This is very effective dye. Nicholas is going to have pink underwear for a while, until I get some blue dye to make them all purple.

The hot as hell day

We started it at the beach, since hey that's what you do on glorious days. It was a -2.8 low tide at noon, which yields a lot of tidal pools. This one trip will generate a webpage of its own, but I had to post some pics here.

We live on geoduck central, and after exploring all the other life we could see (shrimp, three kinds of starfish, fish that hide in holes, mating dungeness crab, flounder, it goes on an on), we played find the geoduck. There are literally hundreds of them down there!

uhhhhhhh

I really don't have much more to add to that at this time. ~A~ is probably damn dying up there, because we are hot as hell. I was enjoying myself earlier in the day-- it was AWESOME. I experienced the first balmy breezes I've felt since moving here, and pretty much lolled in that down on the beach. (great pix from that later when it's not 87 degrees in the house)

Yet the mercury continues to climb, and our peak heat happens at about 5 PM. Remember... people don't have AC here. Not even window units, usually... and our windows won't FIT window units.

I bet the mall is gonna be PACKED later.

Happy Birthday to me

It's that day again. Every year this day just ...ugh. I dont' mind about getting older really. Not in an annual fashion anyway. I just don't like the sag. This sag where I look like me, but droopy. The weight I can lose, so even that doesn't truly bother me. It's my face. I like laugh lines; the skin...heading South....the corner of my eye being imperceptibly lower than it used to be. That bothers me.

I keep waiting for the time in my life when I will finally be thin, finally be straight-teethed, finally be beautiful. Um, whoops. I am thirty five. Better jump on that project, yah?

In related news, today already beats the pants off of the infamous two-people-remembered-my-birthday-but-only-after-3PM year of 2004 (my wonderful Grandmother and my friend Danny--hmmm who does that leave out???) N the blueberry has in fact informed P-daddy that he will be taking care of Momma today. G gave me several pieces of art, including a knotted, beaded necklace which of course, I will sport all day. I am going to give myself a spa morning, where I dye my hair and maybe even shave because God has in fact given me an additional gift as well; it's forecast to be about 77 degrees today, which will seem like heaven to me!


I linked to another blog because it is just that funny. I love her joke here about comments, and sometimes I feel just that way. I get an awful lot of traffic for no one saying anything.

Um. Have you met me?

Freudian Inventory Results

Oral (66%) you appear to be overly passive and dependent, wanting things to be given to you instead of working for them. Anal (40%) you appear to have a good balance of self control and spontaneity, order and chaos, variety and selectivity. Phallic (60%) you appear to have a good balance of sexual awareness and sexual composure. Latency (43%) you appear to have a good balance of abstract knowledge seeking and practicality, dealing with real world responsibilities while still cultivating your abstract and creative faculties and interests. Genital (60%) you appear to be somewhere between a progressive/openminded and regressive/closeminded outlook on life.

Take Free Freudian Inventory Test
personality tests by similarminds.com

I would have to say I agree with the oral fixation, but the whole depending on other people is laughable. It's something I struggle with every day, trying actively to depend on others and "share the load." It seems tidier to just do it all myself.

Meet Elvis

Yes, it keeps on getting better.

Now we have Elvis, the Guinea Pig. No we did not name him that. Yes, we really did get a guinea pig off Freecycle. No I have not lost my mind. Yes, P-Daddy is out of town. No, he doesn't know. Yes, Elvis will live in the schoolroom.

But hey, we get to have children who say I love Elvis and mean it. That should make P-Daddy happy.

Meet Bill

G got a fiddler crab from the beach and named him Crabbo. G loved Crabbo enough that his name made it onto P-Daddy's father's day card. Well, Crabbo didn't so much enjoy being housed with us, so I convinced G to let him free to make his way back down to the beach. G obliged, because she really is an "animal rescuer!" at heart, but that same heart was broken.

Sobbing into the phone with P-Daddy, she asked "Can we get me a hermit crab????? One that can live with us???"

Let's see. Sobbing Baby Girl. On phone with P-Daddy, which means...distance....inability to hug. Instant "yes, of course honey."

So while the little boys and I shopped for new shoes ("these make me run FAST, Mommy!!!!!" and "choooooooooochooooooooooooooo shooooooooooooooes! choooo chooooooo shoooooooes!" ) P-Daddy took the G to the Petco and bought Bill. You can see Bill's home linked above.

G chose the name, and I have no idea where it came from. But Bill seems to like G, so all is well.

Rest in peace, Crabbo!

Twelve Senses, Seven Arts

This ideal really spoke to me. We're so art heavy here, and I am excited to find a way that makes sense to me to punch it through into the other disciplines.

This is really turning into a homeschool blog isn't it? Well, if that is the case then here follows some more homeschool items under consideration.

There is a program called WAVA out of the Steilacoom school district which throws a bone at people like me. I don't HATE public school, per se, but I do really believe in my core that it wastes enormous amounts of time and squashes creativity and individual thinking in a morass of invented rules. K12 is a respected homeschooling curriculum available for purchase. Like many other states, WA has now licensed it for use as a virtual curriculum through the school district. The financial deal is that we don't have to pay for anything (k12 is expensive) and the children are enrolled officially in a public school district. They count G on their books, but I do all the teaching and get a curriculum I might like anyway for free.

One of the things that gives me pause is that unlike a traditional k12 curriculum, G would be taking "assessments." She would be in contact with a teacher from the district who will "help us" with our progress. WAVA participants also must participate in the pile of horseshit known as the WASL, and I kind of groove on the idea of having an invisble child or two. G is not known to the state yet, as kids here do not have to report to school until they are 8, and if I enroll her now I will have to file the homeschool letter of intent every year should I choose to not continue with WAVA.

The meeting is on Saturday at a museum in Tacoma. I am very much looking forward to it. (Then after that.........we get to go to a program hosted by Wolf Haven International at our local library. Obviously, I am a big fan of wolves, but G has shown some interest in them as a result of it.)

The other consideration is a GH homeschool organization also administered through the public school district, which allows for a much more liberal relationship between home and brick and mortar school. It seems pretty active and if you look at their yearbook for this year, G's age group has a significant amount of kids for a community this size. This is extremely appealing to me. Local, local, local. There is no secret about my grand affection for Pugetopolis at large, but when it comes to day in and day out, I'd rather engage here at the municipal level rather than go over to Tacoma, for example and participate in their (extremely well-organized and dynamic) homeschool HUB. We mindfully chose to live here, and I'd like to surround ourselves with other people who made the same decisions for themselves and their children.

Having said that, Kitsap county (adjacent to us) also has some really good offerings for the homeschooler, the most attractive to us being in the arena of music. They even have organized choirs for the children.

We also watched the Search for the Atocha, so that G could see where her coin came from. The documentary was a nice launchpad for discussion of hurricanes, shipping traditions, international trade then and now, and what constitutes "treasure." What do people value? We compared the Atocha to the wooden boats the kids had boarded at the maritime gig festival, and we learned that G now wants to have all the treasure off the Atocha. Failing that, she says she will just have to find treasure all her own. She says she has a lot to do when she is a grown up.

Oh cool!

Nut and dairy free blogger. Anyone who links to sunbutter as much as I do is ok in my book!

From ChicknGirl

(leave your name and...)

1. I'll respond with something random about you
2. I'll challenge you to try something
3. I'll pick a colour that I associate with you
4. I'll tell you something I like about you
5. I'll tell you my first/clearest memory of you
6. I'll tell you what animal you remind me of
7. I'll ask you something I've always wanted to ask you
8. if i do this for you you must post it in your journal


So this is for Emily:

1. You're one of the few people who managed to verbally shock me: I don't want to fuck it! I want to knit it!!!
2. I challenge you to find a friend to watch the kidlets while you get to the Stitch N Bitch in GH.
3. Green
4. Your velvety voice and generous laugh
5. Getting out of your car and laugh-shouting at me "Your directions suck!"
6. A Rabbit
7. OMFG WHERE ARE YOU GOING TO MOVE??? YOU HAVE TO TELL ME. YOU MUST. DO IT. I KNOW YOU READ THIS. TELL ME. DO IT. DOOOOOOOOO EEEEEEET.
8. You already did it, so hey! :p


For Tera:

1. Damn woman, how grateful am I that you explained the one broken pinto bean effect.
2. I challenge you to pack one room a day this week down to the kids-are-at-boarding-school level.
3. Terra cotta orange, for so many reasons
4. What's NOT to like. I admire your fearless and compassionate nature.
5. On our May 2002 I-Pillage EC. You are and I were the leading contenders in the actually-LOSING-weight-while-pregnant class.
6. Smokey the Bear
7. Would you really ever consider moving here if thingbop gotta job?
8. Post it in your journal

Programming the Organic Computer

Yesterday we went into Tacoma and had a nice, family, way-unschooling day. It was reminiscent of our "Thursdays" when we first began homeschooling. We began the day with breakfast, the kids played together while I cleaned up around the house, and then I cleaned out the van (which I habitually do on a weekly basis now, yay me!). When I went outside, so did they.

The following vignet is an example of how unschooling works, and why it is so cool. I am not a Radical Unschooler, but I fully understand the concept.

While I was cleaning out the car, N offered to help and pulled out his Gandalf staff from the back of the car. [insert link tomemorial day here] The kids decided that instead of the staff, they'd like to make another bird feeder (this will make our 8th feeder this spring).

I did nothing. I contributed little but encouragement while the two older children found supplies, fended off D, devised a plan and created their little bird stand. They staked their yard art and happily completed a project that required initiative, imagination, engineering and an understanding of animal behaviour. More experienced homechool Moms could probably add in a few more categories there, but I was happy with it. And this was just the 30 minute block of time before we left for our homeschool enrichment day out!

After that, we filled the rest of the feeders and made our way into Tacoma. We had a picnic lunch in the park next to the market, sucking down honey sticks and listening to some way-out-there, new-age harpist named Destyne singing for the entire time about living for today. Every song was about living in the now. She's obviously a big fan of living for today. Cause. She said it a lot. The kids soaked up the atmosphere but barely tolerated a picnic, as they knew we were really there for the free-Thursdays children's museum.

I set the kids loose in there and looked forward to some down time. The Tacoma Children's museum, while competent and visually appeallng, is probably the smallest children's museum I have ever seen. It is in effect one long shoebox with dividers for the discrete areas You can see the length of it and pretty much hear that far too. A few of the exhibits really rock and the kids love it, which is what matters. The part I like about it is that it's in the same building as my dh's job and there is only one way in and out.

Given this setup, I was confident I didn't need to hover to supervise the big kids, and I thought D would wander nicely on his own. Welllllllllllll.... almost. I did end up having to follow him around, and I did enjooy playing with him, but I was disappointed. I had brought skirezort's blanket to work, but I only got maybe 15 stitches in.

Frankly, this is what shames me: I was annoyed that I had to play with my son.

Other mothers were engaging their kids. Once upon a time I would not have even considered trying to shed a 17 month old. I saw the other mothers and they reminded me of well, ME before I had three. D has been a sweet, loving child but comparatively high maintenance when you consider his sleep issues. While he sleeps through the night now, he does it in our bed. At 17 mos, I am still nursing him to start the day at 5.30 am. If I am lucky, he'll go back to sleep, but that's a crap shoot.

It's obviously not D's fault that I am not engaged with my children the way I'd like to be; life is not very understanding of that. Lessons with G, N will be up our behinds. Pick a child, the others will use their sibling rivalry skills to interrupt. We have the garden to tend, the animals to feed, the house to clean and maintain. Life. Oh yes, that spouse thing. When deos one even have time for a conversation, much less intimacy or sex?

I simply don't know where I should get the energy to DO like I think is optimum for my kids. Further, I don't know whether I should do what I think is optimum. Am I over thinking it? Over reaching? I just don't know. Do I feel depression lurking because I am depressed, or simply because I am depleted? It doesn't take much to perk me up, so I don't think it is the big D. Factor in that children act like, well, children and you have some pretty high-energy dynamics going on in our household.

What I have decided to do to address the issue is just re-order our lives. We've been moving toward a more organic flow with thing. I used to have structured weeks, allowing for days to just "be." It's pretty much reversed now, and to some extent that seems to be working. We're not computers. I can't just tweak some html markup and javascript and suddenly transmute our lives in appearance and function. People change slower, over weeks and months. That alone is frustrating. Just altering habits within yourself takes so much time, but to do it for a whole family?

I will not give up on this. Nearly weekly I still marvel at their physical beauty, their athletic prowess, the creases of their smiles, the way their hair glints in the sun. I truly love being a mother. I love our specific little quirky family. I am grateful all the time, in stunned disbelief, that the life which started out as it did should have provided me with this amount of love and beauty. What I want is to have that feeling of wholeness and solidity that I envision when I think about our family. It will get there.

If I clean out the garage. :p

My bubbles, oh let them stay bubbles.

Our taxes on our house. Ugh.

The assessment for the value of our home, on which the taxes are figured, rose by
Ninety Thousand Dollars.

Reminders to self (to stem off hysteria):

• Beans and rice taste good. You like them.
• WA state has no income tax. This is where it all comes from.
• Beans and rice taste GOOD.
• Renting's not that bad.

Poop and a 4 yr old

This should raise the eyebrows of the weirdos who have surfed into my log after google searches for "caught poop" and "poop on foot." Sicko fetishists.

Right now. As we speak. My son is in the garden lean-to pooping behind the lawnmower. It's his "fake bathroom" he says.

This. Is. Gross.

He uses the gargantuan maple leaves we have to clean himself....my little naturalist. I don't know whether to be horrified or think he's clever.

Wispy hair

My baybay has wispies. He's never had so much as an ear trim.

Now he has car seat head, where he has that tangled bit in the back of his head? It's pretty bad on a routine basis, so I mentioned this morning that I would have to be trimming it.

G went on rant. No one was trimming her baby's hair. That's not alright with her. He's cute enough. He doesn't need to look like every other baby in the world. She went and got her detangler and brushed his hair out by herself.

"NOW we just need tomake sure we brush his hair every day (ok, G cause I don't, right?) and he can keep his cute hair."

Friend Chowdah

This weekend was long and boisterous. It was a hobbit party. It truly was. We had party guests from 1 PM Saturday until 10.30 PM that night. Our houseguests stayed over until the following afternoon, when we all went clamming and had some more people come back for that.

G did indeed hijack the initial festivities and the big girls had a dance party in her newly minted room while the youngers tore up Nick's room and bounced around outside. Then they alllllllllll joined up outside for the daddy-led yard games while the amused parents wandered around yapping. It was a little grey for G's wet slide party, so we didn't bust out the sprinkler.

Schnaygirl counted heads, and until she did that at 10 PM I had no idea we'd had 13 adults and 15 children.

Holy

shit.

Aside from the requisite pretzels and corn chips and stuff, we used an entire 1/4 sheet cake and a Dutch oven full of Grandaddy's rice pilaf. We had nuggets and fries for the kids and they ate all those as well. I never run out of party food, and we did that day. Even so, Schnayboy screwed up the courage to have Dave's insanity sauce on his pilaf again. Life was good.

G opened her gifts and it was really sweet. There wasn't one random present in the bunch. G is old enough that she is known to people now, and she got some really creative, thoughtful gifts. It made her happy and I was pretty touched.

Guests began to leave so P-Daddy fired up the bonfire. That's an invitation to stay, which some of our friends took. Indiegirl even left, tucked her kids in for the night and came back, and most of us sat around the fire sipping hooch while the kids sat with the rest of us inside watching Nanny McPhee. My kids were the first to crash, so I got to go to sleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep around 11.45.

The next day Schnayboy came over earlier than planned because we'd scored a bunk bed on freecycle. P-daddy and Schnayboy lit out of here for FAR EAST TACOMA (BLECH) to meet these people at 10 AM. I watched Schnaybaby (a tow-headed 2 yo boy who chirps) and that kind of relegated us to cereal for breakfast because I didn't want to do my big giant breakfast thing without P-daddy watching our kids and with an extra baby, fuhgeddaboudit.

Well? Freecycle assholes didn't even show up. Wasted our time, wasted my guests' time and just generally pooped on the idea of freecycle altogether. This rarely happens to me, and when it does, I take it with a grain of salt. This time though, it dragged several of our friends into it and that pissed me off.

I was further enraged that in my feeble sleep-deprived attempt to make early espresso, I neglected to put water in my stovestop espresso machine and I melted the handle and the o-rings together. What an idiot. NO latte, and now, no latte maker! UGH UGH UGH.

I did get the green goo finished, which was a good thing since the Mommies who lovingly slathered the children in nuclear-holocaust SPF sunscreen forgot to put it on themselves. Sunburns = owie.

So, the men came back and we trooped down to the beach. P-daddy got some clams for his chowder (which he made Monday night) and we generally all collapsed in a heap in the sunshine-filled back yard. That's right, sunshine. Hence no chowder.

After hiking the beach slope, we came home and the kids had their sprinkler party with G after all. That's a beautiful sight and sound there, my friends. A nice end to a good weekend.

Save the net people

Corporate America is out to ruin our damn lives, I swear it.

One room down, gazillion to go

G's room is installed. OMG. I didn't get to paint it, but she's finally got everything hung and put away where it needs to be. I'd like more art in there for her, and non-cream colored walls, but this is a good feeling.

It's a lot more involved than it sounds, involving construction and repairs and welding. (Yes, welding.) but hey! It's done!

Gone with the guilt!

Now G wants to change her birthday party into a dance party in her room. Ahem. Sound familiar?

---

Watched the first four episodes of LOST season one last night. How much do I love netflix???? The show was good enough that the commercials would have slayed me.