As with many of these growth spurts, it all seems to happen at once. One minute you’re happily playing peek-a-boo with your mostly stationary child, the next there’s been a firmware upgrade and you’re playing clapping games while your child stands in front of you unsupported, then sits down, turns around, and wanders off when bored.

In our case, the marriage of hand co-ordination and linguistic comprehension has meant that in the last two weeks alone, our daughter has started to clap with intent in response to “If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands” rather than the random and occasional thing it was before; to wave “bye bye” when someone says it; to sign “mama” in Auslan in response to “Where’s Mama?” or “Say ‘Mama’”; the sign “all done” and say “ah dah” as she does it; to sign “up” even more clearly now accompanied with (at least once) a long, drawn out “aaaaaahhhhhhp”; and to communicate fairly consistently when she needs to poo (unfortunately, we used the grunt-and-ssss method of encouragement for elimination communication, so “I need to go” is “unnnnghhhh”; I’m working on changing that to “poo” or the sign for it).

Intent is an amazing thing. We’re trying the “No cry sleep solution”, as I mentioned last post and the bed time routines are going well. Although she’s only slept through the night once, she is sleeping longer and I’m seeing marked improvement in how quickly and happily she’s going to sleep — I’m not holding a crying baby at 8.30pm who is only just going to sleep; instead I’m patting a restless one who woke up again after a 40 minute sleep-cycle and is trying to learn how to get herself back into the next one. We’ve always had a book before bed (from when she was a week old) but we didn’t have the longer wind-down we clearly needed and now have.

Tonight was a break-through. After dinner, I took our daughter into the lounge room, turned off the main light and sat down for some quiet play. She stood up, went to the table, took one of her books out from under something else, looked at it and put it on the floor, then took a second book that had been under that, looked at it and brought it to me. She then sat down in my lap and waited expectantly. She asked me to read to her and she chose the book she wanted. That’s kind of amazing. What’s more, it’s like saying, “Mama, I’m tired now. Can we skip the playing bit and go to the reading bit?”

As for me, well, I didn’t miss the first two steps unaided and work is pretty fulfilling. I love the way my girl lights up when her Daddy says he loves her and I can’t imagine a better place to be right now. Well… I have some projects I’d like to get started on, but I have this family that’s more important right now.

And a little girl’s birthday party to organise.

I was going to write this article about the scientific arguments against “cry it out” or “controlled crying” (and I will get around to that article) but I realised I’m too tired and the nagging cough is getting to me. Instead, you get a top-of-the-head rant about health and priorities. To some extent, it’s about why we’re even talking about cry-it-out and sleep issues and why I want to compare the “sleep whisperer” book (Save our Sleep) with Elizabeth Pantley’s No Cry Sleep Solution which I’m reading now. But that’s for next time.

At work today, I met another one of those annoying parents who tells you that their four-month-old is sleeping through the night and has been since they were six weeks old. I don’t dare ask if their child sleeps in another room, has been crying it out or whatever. I trust that there are some children who magically do that. Mine isn’t one of them. I’m thrilled because, instead of waking four and five times a night, she’s currently only waking twice a night.

I was amazed to read in Pantley’s book that “sleeping through the night” actually refers to sleeping for five hours or more in a stretch. My darling does that happily, so long as it’s from 8pm until 3am. Try and give her that “dream feed” that Tizzie Hall talks about and you’ve set her up to wake at 12am, 2am and 4am.

So what am I like after 10 months without a single solid night’s sleep? I’m run down. I’m simply not functioning at the top of my game.

Let me give you the quick re-cap:

I started co-sleeping in the hospital ward, which enticed one nurse to comment, “Oh, that’s what the black women do!” (sorry, readers, but Australia can be amazingly backward at times; our African immigrants are quite recent, and I assume she was referring to the Somalian women who are some of the newest members of our community.) These wakeups were quiet and delightful.

Back home, we co-slept and baby woke every other hour. I slept when he slept and it all went as well as could be expected. I was amazed at my resilience and felt quite rested.

At six weeks, bub was going to sleep mostly as desired, but only with a tight regimen of swaddling, swaying and thumb-sucking (ours, not hers) thanks to Harvey Karp’s Baby Bliss. Some nights were very, very tough.

At around three months, as predicted, things started to get a little more manageable. We still had the incredibly alert baby who would watch a person with an unnerving unbroken stare so long as they kept talking to her. She still took 45 minute naps — none of this two hour stuff for her.

At five months, we decided she would move from our bed into a cradle next to our bed as a transition to her own cot in another room, on the basis of various books mentioning that permanent sleep cycles start around this point. My partner built a cradle that would rock and sleep went smoothly until the six month growth spurt.

From then until now, it feels like we’ve permanently been entering or exiting a growth spurt. We ratchet up to five wake/feed/sleep cycles a night and then down to two then back up to four and so on. And I’ve become very used to it.

We’ve decided we need to do something about it for two reasons. The first is that about a month ago, our little angel outgrew the cradle beside our bed, so now she *has* to transfer to her crib or sleep with us again. We’d like her to sleep in her crib because although I might sleep well when she’s snuggled in bed with us, her Dad doesn’t. The second is that she’s started getting cranky and difficult for him during the day and screaming rather than take a nap — and it’s a vicious cycle.

Some of our changes are already paying off: he’s lying down with her in our bed for daytime naps and she’s sleeping up to two hours sometimes for one nap and having two naps most days.

We started out with feeding her to sleep in her room, laying her down in her cot and then bringing her in to sleep with us when she first woke up. As that’s been working, I’m now feeding to sleep but in her room, laying her down in her crib, feeding her in there again for the first wake-up and then bringing her to us for the second wake-up. We’re making little adjustments based on instinct, negotiation, things we’ve read online and Pantley’s book that we bought three days ago. Suffice to say, last night she only woke at 3am.

The weird thing, though, is how I’m responding to the extra sleep. The 3am wake-up is harder to recover from when I get there after five hours of sleep. Last night was the third night recently where both she and my man are fast asleep and I’m restlessly checking Facebook on my iPhone in the dark.

Of course, nothing is predictable with a baby. She just woke at 10.11pm and I’ve fed her. She’s back asleep in her cot. Who knows, tonight could be another four wake-ups night. If it is, at least most of them I won’t need to get up for.

For those who are going to weigh in about how my daughter will rebel and that girls just like pink or that just wait, she’ll want it when she dresses herself… a) hmmm, funny, I never did and b) I’m not banning the colour from the house, just refusing this bizarre world in which pink is the only colour girls can wear. A few months ago, my little girl had grown into some clothing we’d been given and I reluctantly dressed her in it. Her first pink stuff. Stripey hot pink and orange pants (they look better than that sounds) and a hot pink jacket from someone else. Surprisingly, it looked good. And then I took her out into a world where every other little girl was wearing pink and remembered why I have a problem with it. Have you been into a mainstream clothing shop for babies recently?

It’s about limiting her options. Already. It’s about telling her she can’t have the rainbow. I want to raise a girl who believes she can do and be anything, just like the posters said on the trains when I was growing up. I fear that I’m living in a strange retro world where feminism didn’t happen, despite the fact that I’m working and my partner is not the only man at playgroup, so clearly it did. However, as the slogan goes, I’ll be a post-feminist in a post-patriarchy and we ain’t there yet.

I’m not quite as intense as the Swedish couple who are concealing their child’s gender from anyone who isn’t changing the nappies. I do however understand where they’re coming from. I gave my child a gender-neutral name, partly because I had heard about a study where people were less likely to hire a person based solely on whether their name sounded male or female. I wanted my first interaction with my baby to be non-gendered (it didn’t turn out that way because of an anaesthetist who spilled the beans, but the intention was there!). If this sounds like overkill, then you might be someone who has never been uncomfortable with your gender.

I remember reading in Sandy Stone’s book about her gender transition that some psychiatrist insisted she wasn’t serious about transitioning when she turned up to a session wearing pants. She had to point out the window at the vast majority of cisgendered women out there dressed exactly as she was. And yet today, we have exactly the same double standards about what “femininity” is. When Caster Semenya won a race by too great a margin for a “woman”, she was subjected to a raft of sex tests (and let’s not get confused: it was her sex and not her gender that was in question; her gender identity was clearly female or she wouldn’t have been entering a women’s race). That’s all odd and challenging but when it got offensive was when YOU magazine gave her a makeover: apparently, you’re “really” a woman when you wear make-up and a dress.

Some will say that the Semenya case demonstrates clearly that there are differences between “men” and “women”, that even the small amount of extra testosterone from internal testes gave Semenya an advantage. Well, sure. No one is denying that certain biological characteristics lead to certain practical outcomes on average but these tiny differences, in relative strength, speed, stamina, what-have-you are blown out of proportion through a lifetime of socialisation.

Recent studies have shown that when parents thought they were dealing with girls, they were more likely to describe the child as happy and socially engaged and more likely to underestimate the child’s physical abilities — even when the child was actually a boy they’d been told was a girl. As Sharon Begley explains, in her review of Lise Eliot’s book, Pink Brain, Blue Brain: How Small Differences Grow Into Troublesome Gaps—And What We Can Do About It, “Dozens of such disguised-gender experiments have shown that adults perceive baby boys and girls differently, seeing identical behavior through a gender-tinted lens.”

I can only imagine that such perceptions lead to a long-term distortion of minor differences, as girls are interacted with as if they are more social, thus becoming more social, and as their physical activity is limited for fear they will hurt themselves and they slowly internalise the message that they are not as competent. When we measure “innate” sex differences in adults, it is the result of this long-term conditioning we are measuring. Begley again: “How we perceive children — sociable or remote, physically bold or reticent—shapes how we treat them and therefore what experiences we give them. Since life leaves footprints on the very structure and function of the brain, these various experiences produce sex differences in adult behavior and brains.” (It’s worth reading the whole article; Begley succinctly summarises Eliot’s findings. There’s also an interview over at Salon with Eliot which isn’t as good as it could have been.)

The other book doing the rounds at the moment is Nurtureshock by sociologists Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman. I’ll leave the bulk of my thoughts on this book for another post but one interesting idea from it relates to how we over-reward our children for underachievement and how that actually undermines self-esteem. I question the phrases we use: how often in a day do you say “good girl” or “good boy” when what you really mean is “brave girl” or “clever boy”? And how often are we, through this, disguising the different things we praise boys and girls for? One alternative approach is Alfie Kohn’s Unconditional Parenting. Another book I haven’t actually had time to read, I understand the concept to be that you eschew all criticism and praise and instead just reflect back to the child what they did: “hey, you rolled over by yourself — now you can reach your toy. Hey, you knocked over the milk — now, we’ll have to clean it up.”

While we had trouble doing this consistently, we have done our best to switch to describing our daughter’s actions and affects. It’s amazing how often I now think hard to work out why I think something is praiseworthy — was she adventurous? canny? strong? Would I think those things were praiseworthy in a boy or would I expect them?

I care about this because I want my daughter to grow up confident and capable. I want her to be free from the debilitating disease of self-doubt that seems to afflict almost every woman I know, no matter how competent or high-powered. I worry that she will be one of the few girls in her generation to have those attributes and once again, I worry that my efforts to help her be a strong individual will mark her out as different in a society that colour-codes every toy, every item of clothing and even the pages of the catalogs, just in case we were to mistake a practical toy that encouraged spatial play as suitable for our girl, when obviously, she should be playing with the pink cleaning cart clearly marked “girls only” on the packaging.

The food and wellness diary is my second choice of diagnostic tool. My first, is the two-day low-allergen elimination diet described in “Infant Food Sensitivity: step-by-step self-diagnosis“. The diary is more work, takes more time to get a result, and requires more knowledge (or help) to interpret than the two-day exclusion diet. However, on the plus side, it’s completely safe, easier on your eating requirements, can be used in conjunction with whatever else you are doing, and can help you come to a more detailed understanding of the situation.

What to record

A breastfed infant’s basic food sensitivity diary only needs to record four things:

1. time and date
2. Mother’s intake
3. Baby’s intake
4. Baby’s condition

Keeping it simple, you can rule up four columns in an exercise book. I like to rule a horizontal line at the bottom of each day to make scanning back through the diary easier. While you can use “day 1, day 2…” I find actual dates simpler to use in the long run. Time doesn’t have to be exact, morning/afternoon/night is ok.

Mother’s intake includes everything you put in your mouth: food, drinks, supplements, et cetera. If you want to understand what food additives are in your diet, you can paste the ingredients section of your food labels in there (or just write them out). You only need to paste it once, and refer to that product by name after that. It can be good to give an indication of amount (trace/some/lot) as this may be helpful later.

Baby’s intake also includes anything which goes in their mouth, including nursing, solids, drinks, et cetera. If you are giving baby expressed breastmilk, record the date on which the milk was expressed.

Baby’s condition includes observing everything which might be food-related including symptoms like these.

The souped-up version

When I’m feeling a little overwhelmed or sleep-deprived, I find myself wanting to use a super-detailed spreadsheet to format my food diary. (Here’s a sample I prepared earlier.) It’s more work to set up, but it’s a dream to use — it reminds me what to observe, and most observations are of the yes/no or high/medium/low variety. Your spreadsheet might include:

1. Date/time
2. Mother’s Intake
(a) Safe Foods (list all foods you consumed in this period which you believe to be safe, based on experience)
(b) Unknown Foods
(c) Drinks
(d) Supplements, medication, other
3. Baby’s Intake
(a) Nursing (how much)
(b) Expressed breastmilk (amount and date expressed)
(c) Solids
4. Baby’s Condition
(a) Contented, alert, happy?
(b) Sleeping
(c) Skin
(d) Other notes

Active testing

To be most effective, use your food and wellness diary in conjunction with some elimination experimentation. Using the diary without intervention will remind you which unusual things that you ate might be related to baby’s condition. But if you want to learn which of your regular foods may be having an effect, you’ll need to have a period of time without them.

Hopefully, it won’t be long before you have answers and a happily nursing baby. Good luck!

My mother tells a story that my Nan — my father’s mother — wouldn’t breastfeed him if they had guests, even in another room of the house, because everyone would know what she was doing. She was born in 1899 and had my father at 40, so she came from a very different era. I think about that — my father as an infant, screaming from hunger and being ignored because of social standards — and I feel so sad for him. I worry that this early experience set the scene for his ambivalent attitude to food (and now his diabetes because of that relationship). I worry that we are returning to that sort of society.

I think that some of the discomfort with public breastfeeding is this idea that breastfeeding is intensely sexual and our newly conservative society — ironic, given the amount of flesh shown on the beach or any television you care to flick on — sees sexuality as intrinsically dangerous. Oh wait — no, just female sexuality. Male sexuality is just fine: want to go longer? a bigger penis? would you like some barely-clad woman with your car/beer/burger?

I’m not about to claim that breastfeeding is never sexual. Recently, I came across an incredibly brave post about breastfeeding and this particular woman’s intense dislike of how it felt sexual to her. My nipples have never been particularly sensitive, and apart from the pain of abrasion early on and suffering through mastitis, feeding my daughter has never felt like anything much for me. That makes me a bit sad: I’d been led to believe oxytocin made it a wonderful, dreamy experience, but for me it ranges from a dull chore (early on, when feeding sessions seemed to go forever, I entertained myself by watching Six Feet Under from beginning to end, about an episode per feed) to a pleasant interlude. Either I don’t get the oxytocin or it’s too gentle a transition for me to notice anything is happening.

That’s a distraction from the real issue, though. Even the woman who says breastfeeding is sexual to her is not sitting there revelling in the sensations and wantonly exclaiming her pleasure. So the public discomfort is entirely projection: there’s a mouth on that nipple and that makes the viewer intensely uncomfortable because of their relationship to their body and their sexuality. That’s not entirely surprising in a society where we increasingly cater for fundamentalist fear of female sexuality — the only person who ever explicitly criticised me for breastfeeding in public admonished me that “Muslims live around here too, you know!”

So having wandered into this tangle of icky cultural mores, how do we get out? That is, how do I help my daughter understand that her body is beautiful and natural and that nudity is delightful, not something to be ashamed of? How do we, as a family, continue to have baths together without my partner being accused of indecency? (I say my partner, because we are in a heterosexist society that assumes women are not interested in each other, and to be honest, the statistics do indicate most perpetrators of sexual crime are male). We’re not nudists, in the sense that we don’t go out to summer camps and play tennis while naked, but we live in a warm climate and we certainly have had naked, non-sexual hot-tubs with close friends and we have a very casual attitude to nudity in the house.

It’s complicated: obviously, she needs to know that some people are uncomfortable with nudity, so she doesn’t just get her kit off at random friend’s places. I was going to write that she needs to understand that being nude is something we do in front of really close friends, not strangers but since my whole argument rests on the idea that breastfeeding in public is okay, I don’t really believe that, do I? For me, if I’m honest, it comes down to a belief in topless equality (see TERA or Go Topless!). I have regularly swum topless, I’ve been topless at Burning Man, I’ve even stage-dived topless. I simply don’t see that women’s bodies should be as sexualised as they are, or that men’s should be seen as non-sexual.

My daughter needs a separate message about her bodily integrity, that her body is her own and no one gets to touch it without permission. I want my daughter to grow up proud of her body, comfortable saying an enthusiastic YES! to sex when she wants it and equally comfortable saying a firm NO when she doesn’t, a vibrant young woman who knows that feeding a baby when it is hungry is the most natural thing in the world. I have a feeling that my daughter is going to be a little unusual among her peers and that makes me pretty sad. Either that or she’ll be hyper-embarrassed about her parents, but gee, what’s new?

Top 10 things that cloth-nappying has taught me about laundry

10. It’s really not that difficult to run the washing machine daily, in order to keep yourself in fresh nappies. I rarely find myself “behind” in the laundry these days.

9. Breastfed babies’ nappies don’t smell nearly as bad as formula-fed or solids-feeding babies. I pop my wet and soiled cloth nappies in a dry bucket — no lid — and empty it into the wash daily. Frankly, the open nappy bucket smells a lot less than the covered bin that my older child’s disposable nappies go into.

8. Ordinary washing detergents, soakers and fabric softeners are full of chemicals which are designed to stay in and coat your fabrics. These chemicals include optical brighteners (to get that whiter-than-white look) and perfumes (for that clean, fresh smell). Those lovely expensive modern cloth nappies come with suggestion to optimise absorbency by using washing detergents which do not coat the fabrics. It’s really, really hard to find such a laundry powder.

7. When you start using a non-coating laundry powder, it’s a bit confronting at first when your clothes come out a slightly different colour, and you realize that what you thought was a soap smell is in fact an unnecessary perfume. But when you realize that your standard washing powder coats clothes and nappies with chemicals, and you are putting over a dozen freshly laundered items against baby’s skin each day, you can find yourself quickly becoming more interested in low-residue laundering than you ever thought possible.

6. Bi-carb soda is very effective at reducing your laundry detergent needs. I use half detergent and half bi-carb for a very effective wash.

5. Sunshine is the best bleacher and anti-bacterial agent known to woman. Line drying your clothes in the sunshine removes stains without resorting to chemical bleach, and removes that slight smell that indoor-dried clothing can acquire. If you have to dry nappies indoors, popping them on a rack in front of a heater means you get to use that heat to both dry your clothes and heat your house.

4. That damp “spoiled laundry” smell that you get when you leave wet washing in the machine too long (shock, horror!) is caused by bacteria. Bacteria needs more than just water to feed on — in fact, it feeds on the residues left by your laundry detergent.

3. Different bacteria need different pH levels. If you are using a standard detergent, you can remove a persistent laundry smell by adding bi-carb soda to the wash to raise the pH, and kill all the resident bacteria. If you routinely use bi-carb and find a smell developing again, do a wash with vinegar-only to lower the pH and kill off your crop of high-pH bacteria. But be warned that vinegar damages elastic. I only put very hardy items in a vinegar wash, and rely on sunlight to remove the bacteria from elasticized items. The other favorite bacteria killer is heat – a wash at 60 degrees Celsius will get many strains.

2. When choosing a cloth nappy system, please, please make “drying time” a key criterion. Those delightfully soft and absorbent luxury bamboo all-in-ones are not only expensive to buy, but they are even more expensive if you need to buy 4 days’ worth in order to allow the requisite two days drying time! Hemp is almost as absorbent and a lot quicker to dry. And those simple cloth squares dry in no time at all.

and finally…

1. I’ve had to overcome both a deeply ingrained caution about the dangers of using vinegar and bi-carb soda, while simultaneously overcoming a skepticism that such products could ever be effective. My generation is programmed to believe in the “safety and effectiveness of standard laundry products.”

[One final note from your friendly editor: check that the laundry detergent you buy isn't made by one of the big nasties — you can easily find out which brands are owned by which companies and how ethical they are at the Ethical Shopping Guide]

An allergen is anything the body is allergic to.

Allergens are not (necessarily) bad/junky or contaminated foods. Even the very best good healthy foods are an allergen for someone. While allergens can come to the baby through breastmilk, in general, the mother’s body acts as a filter, turning all sorts of rubbish (from junk food to contaminated water) into healthy, nutritious baby milk. In fact, even if mum has food poisoning, breastfeeding should continue.

How do you do the test?

It’s easy, actually:

Breastfeeding Mother: eat nothing but plain rice and peeled pears, and drink nothing but plain water for a couple of days.

Breastfed Infant: should nurse, but can also be offered cooled pre-boiled water and peeled pears without compromising the test.

Do not offer previously expressed breastmilk, if you can help it, as you won’t know what you ate the day it was expressed.

Artificial colours, flavours and other ingredients in baby paracetamol (and other products you may be using to ease baby’s distress) are also possible allergens. Paracetamol is no longer being used as routinely for children as it once was. I’d consider giving the paracetamol a break during the test. But please continue any prescription medications as directed.

It’s working!

If your hunch about an infant food sensitivity is correct, you will often observe an improvement in nursing behaviour in just a couple of days. Food allergens can take minutes, hours or days to cause a reaction. Also, depending on type, it can take hours, days or weeks after you cease consuming a particularly allergen for your system to be clear of it.

Two days is not a definitive time period. But a hungry, thirsty, miserable baby will be willing to give the boobie a damn good go, if you can noticeably reduce the badness for them. Two days without topping up on the allergens is often enough for this. Two days is also an achievable period of time to be on an extremely restrictive diet before you go CRAZY!!

Is rice and peeled pears a hard and fast rule?

No. There’s nothing magical about rice and pears. Those foods are typically used to kick off an elimination diet as they are about the least allergenic foods we know, but it’s possible (though extremely unlikely) to be allergic to them.

It’s technically possible to spend two days fasting on nothing but water. The production of breastmilk has minimum hydration and rest requirements, but no minimum maternal nutrition requirements. But I would certainly not recommend you try it.

If you need help making it through the two days, you can add foods to the test, but each ingredient you add decreases the likelihood of a clear and immediate result. When I did it, I added butter to my rice. Many people with a dairy allergy can (for whatever reason) tolerate butter.

Interpreting results from the test

You are primarily looking for an improvement in nursing behaviour. Are nursing sessions longer, more relaxed, with less screaming, biting and back arching? Is there an improvement in overall behaviour and a reduction in your baby’s distress?

Yes, these observations are very subjective, and not the stuff of scientific experiment. But it’s your child, you love them, and you need them to be happy — so your instincts on these things are often right.

Beyond nursing-related behaviours, I wouldn’t agonize trying to look for a lot of other evidence of change in just two days. It’s too soon to expect to see visible skin signs clear up, and baby’s fear of the pain will continue to affect their behaviour. Hunger will motivate them to nurse, however miserable they may feel. These other symptoms all add to the picture if/when you get to keeping a food diary.

What to do after a positive result

If your fasting (and restricting baby’s solids) is giving your precious child some relief, then naturally, you are not just going to revert back after two days. But you can’t continue to eat only rice and peeled pears either.

In my case, I took a punt and tried adding back all low salicylate foods. Salicylates are one of the food patterns which can assist in elimination diet testing. By testing for salicylates first, I was able to add back several foods at once.

Luckily for us, salicylates have proven to be the key to our problem. When I mistakenly eat something which is high in salicylates, my baby visibly suffers from it and his temperature rises as his immune response kicks in. I had a tense few days testing whether the “medium salicylate” fruit and vegetables were going to be a problem for us, and I’m glad to say that they are not.

Other sources which may be helpful include fed up and friendly food.

The negative result

If there is no change in baby’s nursing behaviour, the result is slightly less informative. How pure were you about only having rice, peeled pear and water? Did you use preserved pears with a food additive? Were you taking any other supplements or medications? Did baby have anything other than breastmilk, water and peeled pear? Was two days simply not enough for baby’s particular type of allergen to be flushed out sufficiently for their constitution to notice an improvement? Is baby allergic to the pears?

Again, trust your instincts. If you feel that you gave it a good go, then it might simply be something else.

What next?

However you choose to proceed, you might find it helpful to keep a food and wellness diary to keep track of your success. No matter what happened with the test, at least you have one more piece of information for your doctor (eg. “I experimented with eating only rice and pears for two days, and it didn’t seem to make any difference.”).

In my ideal world, we’d both have part-time jobs, but a variety of factors, not least being the global economic downturn, mean I headed out the door this morning at 8am, headed back in at 6.10pm and I’ll be doing that every weekday for at least the next three months. Luckily, this is a short-term contract, so if it doesn’t work out, I have options.

I have a feeling that I’m going to be fine, though.

I felt a small pang of guilt that I’d failed to adequately farewell my bub when she was asleep as I left. I’d seen her and fed her already, but still… I was more occupied by the idea that despite my best efforts, I had failed to transform my left breast from a lumpy rock into a nice soft pillow again and as a result, last night, my temperature started rising. Mastitis, the night before day one of a new job? I imagined having to call in sick on my first day. And I imagined having the contract terminated, because, honestly, how reliable can a lactating woman be if she’s always at risk of mastitis? (Yeah, my self-talk isn’t great when I’m feverish.)

Once I got to work, I found myself taking about the baby. New boss is lovely, but childless and doesn’t seem to be the clucky type. She was buying tickets to a metal concert as they went on sale at 9am and I couldn’t help but think how concert tickets are not on my horizon right now. I had to find something that wasn’t the baby to talk about, but it wasn’t long before I had to ask about where the fridge was so I could express. I felt guilty about taking 20 minutes in the toilets pumping (and very weird when someone came into the next cubicle).

Back at my desk, I was given online induction modules and clicked on a link to read the HR policies. Baby Care? As an HR policy? Well, of course, I read that one! And discovered that my new employer is committed to supporting women who return to work and follow the International Labor Organization’s guidelines on creating a supportive environment for lactating women to express. As a result, they have a baby care room with an electric pump and a microwave and couches. Nice! I asked my boss where it was. She looked it up on the intranet — not in our building. It’s a three minute walk away. Extra guilt at the thought of having to take 30 minutes to express… two breaks in my work day at least!

My loving partner brought the baby in for lunch, so I fed her and had a quick cuddle — very wary that she might posset on my work clothes — it felt so rushed!

Back at work, and I realised I am nowhere near as challenged by what I’m doing as I am by the juggling act of parenting. Hmmm.

4pm, off to the baby room. Much better than the toilet. Still guilty, though. Try to tell self that this work ethic is not useful, that guilt is not useful, and that smokers take many more breaks over many more years than I will be. And this is with a supportive employer with written policies!!

I don’t think it’s just me. I’m not surprised women find the return to work a challenge and often end up weaning. We need to be hugely supportive of expressing and on-site creches to change this work culture. Our babies need breastmilk, until they’re two, ideally. In order to express successfully, women need a relaxed environment and no guilt. The Australian Breastfeeding Association agrees that two thirty-minute lactation breaks are ideal. How can I change my mindset so that this is okay?

The day ended on a great note though: I rang HR to ask about access to the baby care room, and the woman on the other end offered to come down and give me an access card. She turned out to be six months pregnant with her second and keen to get my feedback on the room: what needed to change? Would a PC in there help? And she reassured me that it would quickly be a thing I’d only need to do once a day as my baby’s needs changed. She also fed her first child until she was almost two, and started work when the baby was seven months old.

Work/life balance is great as a concept, but I now realise I needed a life induction as well as a work induction. I’m so glad it happened, even though it was random. And I’ll make a note of it so I can ease the transition of other women into work in future. Returning to work without support has the potential to overwhelm women, leading to early weaning. Breastfeeding until baby is two has the potential to undermine some of feminism’s gains if we think it means tying women to the home and out of paid work — women in some cultures have been working with babies on their backs, feeding them regularly on the job for years. Let’s see if we can’t combine our achievements in the workplace with our knowledge of what’s best for our babies.

According to the fabulous video, The Story of Stuff, in the US, 99% of the stuff that is bought ends up discarded within six months. That’s just disgusting to me. Then there’s the issue of pollutants and pesticides in growing new cotton… it’s a fraught issue. My guidelines go something like this:

1. Avoid new if possible. Reuse.
2. If new is necessary, try hand-made, market-made, fair trade rather than corporate.
3. If these aren’t available, aim for commercial but organic & sweatshop-free.

Everything old is new again

One of my solutions is recycling, but even better is reusing. There’s a reason that the slogan is ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’. It’s supposed to go in that order. Secondhand is good, fifth-hand is better. Once upon a time, everything was made to last, and then the capitalists realised that their markets were finite unless they did something about it. That something was inventing built-in obsolescence. So, fifth-hand is about as good as you’ll get these days.

With stuff for kids, there’s also a cost factor. Even if it’s second-hand, shelling out hard-earned cash for something you’ll use for maybe a year at most is disheartening.

The hand-me-down system is a gem here — our baby’s cot, cot sheets, high chair, the glider I feed her in, all came from diverse wonderful friends. They don’t always have what I’m looking for though. Freecycle (which almost certainly has a chapter in your area, so check it out) is one way I solve this: I got my baby’s change table for free from a Freecycler, and recently I’ve been grabbing bags of clothing.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder

There’s a problem here though. The clothing from Freecycle is frequently not what I would buy myself. For one thing, it’s almost all gender coded in ways that I find extremely challenging. (I’m sure there was a gender revolution when I was growing up. Second-wave feminism, wasn’t it? How on *earth* did we get back to every single girl baby wearing only pink?) For another thing, at least half of it is polyester or poly-cotton, which I avoid.

Ideally, we’ll make the clothes ourselves and swap with other people doing the same, on and round and down the chain. This is time-intensive, of course, and I don’t think one mama could possibly take care of her bub and knit/sew/make every stitch they wear. Not in this day and age. Unless you’re happy with baby owning only five items in any one size. And washing every single day.

What my little conspicuously consuming little heart really wants to do is go out to all those adorable clothing stores and buy pure organic cotton and bamboo items so that her darling skin never has to touch anything harmful. And I’ll feel good doing it, right?

Well, wait a minute. Organic is one thing, but who made the stuff? Was someone exploited in the process? So now, I have another criterion: fair-trade or Australian-made so I know there was no sweatshop labour involved. And ideally, that cotton was grown somewhere with abundant natural rain, because growing cotton is intensely water-intensive and Australia doesn’t have a lot of it (it’s an issue everywhere, to be honest). Complicated enough for you?

I thought I’d try to make it easy by keeping track of the local brands and what they claim, so I have a quick reference guide handy.

I’ll add to this as you help me find other brands.

These are the ones I know… I haven’t had time to research extensively. Got a favourite brand? I’ll add it to the table!

Oh, and of course, anything I buy new gets added back in to the hand-me-down/Freecycle system. I won’t throw it away unless it’s absolutely falling apart. It’s only fair.

Phthalates are an ingredient in consumer plastics, despite the scientific debate around their potential to be endocrine disruptors.   As with BPA there is insufficient labeling of phthalates to assist consumers who would like to choose to play it safe. We all have phthalate metabolites in our urine – evidence of phthalate exposure – the only question is “how much?”

Phthalate esters are plasticisers widely used for a whole host of applications in a wide range of products, including PETE (Recycle 1) food containers, PVC (Recycle 3) building materials and in personal care products (for the various emulsifying/gelling/suspension/dispersion/lubricant qualities and to make fragrances last longer). What’s a plasticiser? It’s designed to soften hard plastics. In other words, it’s one of the ingredients that makes lovely squishy baby toys squishy.

Children’s exposure is higher than adults’. Babies’ mouthing behaviour, the use of baby care products, the higher dosage-for-size, the lower metabolic capability and their still-developing endocrine and reproductive systems combine to make babies much more susceptible to potential effects. There’s also evidence to suggest that pregnant women might want to be careful too (see below).

Identification of phthalate use is non-existent in many product categories, especially building materials and food packaging. Without a statement from the manufacturer, only gas chromatography can confirm the presence or absence of phthalates. I am not aware of any handy services which allow consumers to bring in a small sample of their old vinyl flooring from home to be tested.

The international regulatory environment is fractured. Unfortunately, where consumers would prefer caution and transparency, a ban in one jurisdiction is typically met with evidentiary hair-splitting and self-justification in others. Commercial interests continue to be protected by the ongoing obfuscation of phthalate use. Meanwhile consumers who would like to choose to be cautious have no viable way of accurately identifying their phthalate exposure.

The effects of phthalates on humans are still under investigation. They are thought to be endocrine disruptors, linked to ‘fetal changes’, insulin resistance, metabolic disruption and allergies and asthma in children. See Wikipedia: phthalate for details.

There is clearly a lack of good faith dialogue between consumer concerns and commercial interests in the area of phthalates. Even finding words to describe this issue simply and accurately is difficult. What does “fetal changes” mean? I certainly hope I didn’t accidentally misuse someone’s jargon there. It would have been simpler to say “birth defects” but those words are both alarmist, and they have a specific scientific meaning. Wikipedia cites a study which found human phthalate exposure during pregnancy resulted in decreased anogenital distance among baby boys. That sounds like evidence of potential birth defects to me. Wikipedia goes on to say:

“An editorial concerning this paper in the same volume stated that the study population was small, and “needs to be investigated more thoroughly in a larger, more diverse population”. While anogenital distance is routinely used as a measure of fetal exposure to endocrine disruptors in animals, this parameter is rarely assessed in humans, and its significance is doubtful.”

The American Chemistry Council’s Q&A however, assures us that this study “failed to establish a causal link”. It  also says:

“Q. Aren’t phthalates endocrine disruptors?
A. In lab tests with rodents, phthalates do not block the action of male or female hormones, or mimic their behavior.” [full stop, next question]

Perhaps the answer is to be found with Our Stolen Future, which argues the need for a paradigm shift in the methods, assumptions and standards used in assessing the safety of phthalate esters.

Phthalates are easily released from plastics, but they don’t hang around long out-doors. Their low solubility in water, and the fact that an adult can metabolise them in minutes, are also probably contributing factors informing the traditional view that phthalates are safe to use in plastics. It’s also worth mentioning that phthalate release from plastics increases as the plastic degrades over time and in sunlight. Phthalate release from vinyl flooring is increased by the use of polish, and the phthalates also hang around in dust. The low solubility of phthalates in water may explain why PETE is the main choice of plastic for commercially bottled water and soft drinks. However, with the high solubility of phthalates in oil, I am very concerned that PETE (aka Polyethylene terephthalate) is also the packaging of choice for cooking oil in my local supermarket.

More technical information (and referencing) is available in the Wikipedia: Phthalates article. What are some phthalate-reduction suggestions?

Reducing my family’s phthalate exposure
There are plenty of websites on how to reduce your phthalate exposure. Just Google “phthalate free” or “avoid phthalate”. I don’t think it’s possible to avoid phthalates completely, and any advice on this topic is values-laden and context-specific. So this list is most relevant to me and people like me.

Reduce baby’s direct exposure: don’t use baby care products (unless you’ve read the contents and the container is glass or you’ve checked the container’s plastic type). This is easier than you might think, since most baby wash, baby shampoo, baby moisturizer, baby powder, nappy cream, baby cologne, et cetera is completely unnecessary. I use bath oil, bicarbonate of soda and sometimes a little nappy cream and that’s all.

Don’t give baby any PVC vinyl products to play with, wear, eat from or sleep on. This includes toys, bibs, art smocks, rain coats, nappy covers, change mats, mattress protectors, plastic table protectors, hand bags, shoes, cubby-houses, place mats and funky bean-bags. Sure, not all PVC contains phthalates, but phthalates are the cheapest and most commonly used plasticisers in PVC, so unless a product is very specifically marketed as Phthalate Free it probably does contain them.

Reduce the phthalate levels in your home environment by avoiding the use of vinyl flooring. If you have a good condition vinyl floor, avoid dust build up, and DO NOT use floor polish products. This is important, there are studies linking phthalate exposure to the use of floor polish. My place is cleaned with nothing stronger than eucalyptus oil, a mop and a vacuum cleaner. Another common use of vinyl you might not think of is your shower curtain. I made my own using some bargain nylon dressmaking fabric – it’s beautiful and it works just fine.

My family gets cars second hand, and I’m sure this helps too. Vinyl is used extensively in cars and that new car smell which lasts anything up to a couple of years is quite revolting to my nostrils. I don’t have a definitive reference as to the off-gassing profile on cars over time, or if phthalates can reliably be detected by smell. I can say with certainty that you should avoid dashboard polish products. I get my car cleaned occasionally, but I don’t let them do the inside any more, as they invariably use polish products.

Ventilation is important. This includes your home and your car. Houses are little pollution traps and the outside air is usually cleaner. Sunlight also degrades phthalates. If the weather or other local conditions make it impossible for you to ventilate daily, you’ll need to pay a lot more attention to removing phthalates from your home.

Personal care products, including cosmetics, also deserve a mention. Your own health is worth looking after, and pregnant women might be especially interested in their phthalate exposure. Nail polish, hair spray and perfumes keep coming up as the main sources of phthalates in cosmetics. But it’s not that simple. According to think before you pink, the trade secrets loophole allows any fragranced cosmetic product to contain phthalates without explicitly listing them. Personally, I’ve been seeking fragrance-free products for years. The only cosmetics I use these days are a simple olive oil soap, organic toothpaste, an unpackaged sulphate-free conditioner base and occasionally some Sorboline.

Polyethylene terephthalate: PETE and polyester. I don’t know enough about the potential for phthalates to off-gas or leach from PETE and polyester, but it’s definitely on my list of things to check out. At the moment I’m making sure that I buy my cooking oil in glass, and I’m trying to reduce my reliance on those handy little pop-top drinking bottles. I’m also making a point of not leaving drink bottles to heat up in the car, throwing them away at the first hint of a smell, and not re-using them too many times. I haven’t yet seen enough evidence to get me riffling through the baby clothes to weed out the polyester. I’m not buying any more polyester if I can help it, but culling the existing clothes would be a big undertaking. [Ed: I do avoid all polyester clothes already.]

It’s not easy being a mum. Nurse, teacher, bodyguard, lawyer, and now, apparently, I get to be a research chemist as well!