Days 2 and 3

Its not officially a juice feast yet! We are still easing into things around here. Especially today when I was obliged to keep a commitment to my mom's group and go blueberry picking with the babes. If you've ever had blueberries fresh off the bushes, you understand why it was important that I wait just one more day...

Day Two (Monday)

Early morning: ~ 12oz. Orange Juice
(Shared with Sebastian)

Late morning: 8 oz. almond milk banana smoothie (light on the banana)
(shared with Sebastian)

Throughout the day: 3 8 oz. jars orange juice
(Sebastian: 1 banana, 1/2 avocado)

Late afternoon: enema

Late afternoon / Early evening: 1 blended soup of avocado, carrot, tomato, bell pepper, cucumber (shared with Sebastian)

Sebastian nursed approximately every three hours

Day Three (Tuesday)

Early morning: 8 oz. orange juice (Sebastian had a sip)

Late morning: 1 quart green juice (Sebastian drank ~ 4 oz.)

Later morning
Blueberries all around!!

Late afternoon: Blended soup of avocado, cucumber, carrot, tomato, bell pepper
(I enjoyed this during Sebastian's nap)

Early evening: more blueberries - oops, bad combining and I am noticing it, too.
(Sebastian - 1/2 banana, 1/2 avocado)

Sebastian nursed about every three hours.

Please make sure to read my disclaimer if you are considering a cleanse or juice feast while nursing.

Juicy!

Here we are the last time there was a major juice activity in the house. This photo was taken on Thanksgiving. Enrique was in the second month of his yearly juice cleanse. I did about three days around this time and was eating a high-raw diet. Before Sebastian started crawling, I was doing yoga with him at least 2 times per week, walking with him in the stroller almost daily and generally in much better health. Sometime since the beginning of the year things got hectic and I have gone way off track with my health. I think I've probably gained a good 5-7 lbs. in the last three months. At this point I think I am about 25 lbs. overweight and my energy is very erratic.

In honor of summer, Enrique and I have embarked on another juice adventure! I will be juicing and continuing to nurse Sebastian. Contrary to many rumors about the dangers of juicing while nursing, this is actually a safe practice. The breasts are not a detox channel, and the body has safeguards in place for our babies during times of hardship. As I experience my female body in all its possibilities, nature continues to amaze me.

I began yesterday with a few gentle meals and juices.

Early Morning - 8 oz. orange juice

Late Morning - 1 quart kale, apple, celery, cucumber
(shared with Sebastian)
Dry Brush, shower

Afternoon - 8 oz. smoothie
almond milk with coconut water, banana, raspberry
(Sebastian - almond milk with filtered water, banana)

Late afternoon - 1 blended salad
avocado, spinach, carrot, celery, cucumber, dulse, lemon, sea salt, olive oil

Early evening - steamed carrots
(Sebastian - one avocado)

Energy - Great! It was 108 in Ojai today. Not much physical activity besides a few crunches with the pilates ball.

Nursed approximately every three hours.

Please see my disclaimer for more info on my history and juicing while nursing.

Juicing Disclaimer

I'm adding a disclaimer here because I know there are many people out there who are concerned about toxins in the breastmilk when juicing while nursing. There is strong evidence of toxins passing into the breastmilk and being ingested by a nursing baby. Of particular concern are PCBs, dioxins and other highly toxic chemicals that are more of a reflection of your environment than levels of personal toxicity. Please read this article for more information on toxins in breastmilk and what we can all do to lower the amount of these toxins in our bodies, a benefit to our babies and ourselves.

If you are new to a raw diet or juice cleansing and you are still nursing your baby, I recommend starting out slowly with a high raw diet and moving into a raw food diet. You will notice an incredible amount of benefit from this practice. If you want to speed things up a bit after a few months being 100% raw, replace one or two meals with juice. For those who are completely new to raw foods, Alissa Cohen offers excellent advice for women (and men, too!) on the transition to raw foods and transitional foods that are both delicious and filling -- important while nursing!

For children over the age of one year: Keep feeding your baby! Don't start replacing baby's meals with juice. Sebastian has always had a morning meal of juice. He is a raw baby.

Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions about my philosophy regarding raw transition, juicing, or cleansing while nursing. I do not claim to be an expert in the raw diet or nutrition and I do not offer medical advice. I can only tell you what I have learned from talking to experts and through my own experience.

My history:
I went from SAD to 100% raw overnight in April of 1999. I stayed 100% raw for two years. In 2002 I began eating cooked vegan food again. I have been 100% vegan and high raw since that time. I became pregnant in September of 2006. I had a vegan pregnancy, with my last month of pregnancy being 100% raw. The first three months of my son's life I was 100% raw. After that time I began adding some cooked vegan foods to my diet. My son is now one year old and has eaten a mostly raw diet since birth. I gave him some rice during the winter and immediately he began getting colds. He has had no cooked food since that time and is now in perfect health! He has six teeth, he began walking at 12 months and is in approximately the 50% for his weight and height. He nurses about every three hours round the clock.

Happy Birthday to You!

Sebastian's raw vegan birthday cake

This was the easiest cake ever! I blended bananas with blueberries poured it into a spring form pan and frozen. The stars are blended bananas that I poured into a shallow baking tray and put in the freezer then cut out with a cookie cutter. My family called it "smoothie cake."

Restoration

If you're anything like me, your kneejerk reaction to this photo would probably be anger, disgust. Giant backhoe in the middle of an open field, next to a beautiful oak tree. Tearing up the ground, raping mother Earth -- this is a job for the monkeywrench gang!

Actually this photo represents something of a metaphor for what I have been experiencing lately. This field here is in the middle of a wonderful and transformative healing process. Right now looks as though its being helped through some of the crisis stage.

We live directly behind this field. We were enjoying some warm evenings last month so I opened the back door and suddenly we heard the most beautiful sound of hundreds of frogs singing out in the field. Now, I have lived in this neighborhood on and off for about four years, and that is a new sound altogether. The frogs have returned to the field because the Ojai Valley Land Conservancy is restoring this ordinary field (also known as the Ojai Meadow) back to its original state in nature, which is a wet marshland. So, that sound was like the heralding of this wonderful healing for the ecosystem that was plugged up and planted over for so long. And that is what all the heavy machinery is about. Because to just let the field lie fallow would not actually restore it to health. Which reminded me, sometimes you have to tear down what's in place in order to make things right again.

Breakfast

Green Smoothie!

Thinking about what is appropriate to feed the baby has helped me take notice of my own eating habits. I want to be able to share our food with him, so the simpler we eat, the easier it is for all of us. This morning we three enjoyed a blender full of banana romaine smoothie. 2 bananas, a head of romaine, and 1/2 cup water for consistency.

Paella

Look what arrived at the market, just in time to add to my paella dish.
When you visit the Ojai Sunday market, check out Frank's family's stand. I don't know the farm's name, but its right next to B.D.s (the herb and greens farmer). They always have the first of the summer beauties like these little gems. He even has a few strawberries right now.

To make this paella, I started with Freshtopia's inspired recipe and made a few very minor changes. No farmer could convince me their turnips were as mild as I would prefer (not a big turnip fan) so I used jicama in place of the turnip and I dehydrated the mixture for two hours to remove some of the moisture. I also added red bell pepper strips to the mushroom marinade and dehydrated both of those for a bit to concentrate the flavor. It was fabulous. Wouldn't it be fun to do a Spanish night with tapas, paella, sangria, almond ice cream? I'll probably find the time to accomplish that when Sebastian is thirty or so...

Happy Birthday to Me!

Sun Burger

E. made secret recipe sun burgers for my birthday! And I took a photo with my new camera! Yes, I am so excited!

I haven't posted in a while and I am thinking about what I would like to say about that, so I'll discuss in my next post. In the meantime, I am making raw PAELLA for the SB potluck tomorrow. That was a dish I looooved. Here is the link to freshtopia's video recipe: Enjoy.

More on Nursing

www.thegardendiet.com

Check out Jinjee's new ebook on the yoga of nursing. Sounds like she knows exactly what I am talking about regarding nourishment, comfort and our relationship to food. Her littlest, Yarrow, is two days younger than Sebastian. And if you come check out the Santa Barbara raw meetup (link) you can meet raw baby Theo. He is two days older than Sebastian. We raw mamas were having some fun in August 2006. Sorry if that was crude, but hey! That's nature.

Baby Love

Changes

Sebastian teething on celery - his favorite!

If the hints are any indication - I am getting a new digital camera (with video!) for my birthday. So needed, as you can tell by the quality of the photos on this blog. My birthday is the 17th of February. I will have done the solar loop 31 times. I have some pretty strong intentions for the next thirty years. Truthfully I hope most of them are radically different from the first thirty. There were some pretty rough years in there. Some good ones, but overall the bad outweighed the good. I know that will be different when I look back at age 6o.

Sebastian is changing so rapidly. He's now crawling. He has two teeth and a full head of hair. He has a very strong personality. He has a mesmerizing smile and an infectious laugh.

I received a wonderful email from a woman on our raw meetup group asking what I was doing regarding Sebastian's diet. She was impressed at how healthy he looks. That was gratifying. He is super healthy and I try to keep him as looking as normal as possible. Most of the other moms in my mother's groups have no idea what I am up to, I don't even advertise the fact that he has never been sick. All the other babes have at one time or another come down with myriad different types of illness. He did get a stuffy nose once, but that was due to some extenuating circumstances. Flooding in the house during a storm. I think it stirred up some nasty mold in here, the house is pretty old. We had it all cleaned up and dried out and since then - nothing! Amazing.

What I've been doing lately is breastfeeding him. He has had no solid food in over a month, with the exception of a few little tastes. When he was 6 months, we started a routine of pureed soft fruits and veggies at about noon. I had begun feeding him because he was so interested in what I was eating. But, he quickly grew tired of that. So, I just kept nursing. And he stopped showing interest in my food. And he keeps gaining weight, his coloring is good, and he is right on target for all the developmental milestones. So, that has been working well.

Then, his digestion changed this week (in regards to the amount and timing of output) so I decided that he may need to try again. I picked up some bananas and the wonderful avos that have appeared at the market -- at last. So, today he had a couple of bites. He's not all that interested, but I am going to keep offering and see where that goes.

Be Comforted

Comfort Food. Using food as comfort. If these phrases conjure up some negative associations in your mind, you are not alone, especially in the many health food and dieting circles and the raw foods movement. I've often read that food should not be used as a comfort, should not be eating to soothe the pain, that we should not eat for emotional reasons. That it is unhealthy and we need to do whatever we can to rid ourselves of the crutch of food and start eating for purely nutritional reasons. Once we can do that, we will be free of that ball and chain of FOOD and on the path to purity and paradise.

I've read that I need to wean my baby from nursing himself to sleep and from waking in the night to eat mother's milk. Because he is only doing it for comfort. For emotional reasons. He is using it as a crutch. Other moms tell tales of listening to their babes cry through the night as these mothers cover their own ears and cry themselves to sleep all in the name of yanking away that crutch of food, teaching their babes to get through the night without their comfort food.



Here I tried to find a picture that wasn't too severe in order to illustrate some thoughts that are going through my head. I hesitate to say "illustrate my point" because I don't think I hae one, just a feeling, an impression. That there is something not right about being so afraid to be comforted by food.

(This isn't Sebastian. This is an image I took from the web. )

Those of you who have ever nursed a hungry baby, you know what it means to comfort someone. It is a primal and intense feeling, and if my imprints serve me I can only imagine the depth of the comfort that the babe is feeling each time they come to the breast to eat. When I am breastfeeding my baby, I can't imagine anything more natural and normal than he fill his belly and be comforted. So then, how does this feeling get convuluted as we grow, to turn into a neurosis that we must cure ourselves from through discipline? Why are we projecting this onto our tiny little ones, those who have not even been out of the womb as long as they were in?

I say rethink comfort. Rather than try to divorce that feeling from the act of eating, which--if it is so ingrained in our very cells through all human history, as I do suspect it is--embrace it! Use food as a comfort. How can we not? How can we feel that hunger and that need and then upon satisfying it say that there is no comfort in that act? How can our core not quiver with the memory of hunger and being comforted by the mother's milk (for those of us who were so blessed)? -- crucial, life-sustaining, comforting food. Like trying to fix your relationship with water through purposeful dehydration. Impossible.

I am a fan of juice cleansing and fasting. In fact, I can't wait to do one once the babe is weaned. I mean, I am so excited I am planning it now -- years out. But, the next time, I am looking forward to approaching the experience as a mother, as a nourisher and as a comforter. In the meantime, when I do eat, I intend to give thanks to my own mother Gaia for sustaining me with her bounty of food, comfort and love.

New and Fresh

The obligatory new year post! Had to do it since I haven't posted since November. All are well. Enrique is on his almost third month of a juice cleanse, which he usually does once a year. Baby is inspiring and incredible, as he has more than doubled his birth weight while eating only mother's milk, with the exception of some pureed solid food every three or four days since his first bite on Thanksgiving. And more than growing, he is thriving. He has totally avoided all the colds, fevers, and infections that come with the season and that afflict all the other babes we know. I'm sure it helps that E. and I are never or rarely sick.

Ice cream is a blast! I am so happy we decided to make the jump to selling the ice cream, rather than just enjoying it ourselves as we have done for the last two years. It is just so much darn fun to share the yumminess with others and has introduced us to new and wonderful people. The buzz right now is for the "premium pints" made with macadamia cream. At $15 a pint, I did not think they would sell, but listed them to make the $12 pints seem more reasonable by comparison. I soon learned that when the cost truly reflects the quality and love that go into the product, it is not necessarily going to be an issue.

On a personal note for mama, 2008 is the year for fierce dedication to raw bliss, yoga body and deep, aerobic breathing in the open mountain air. I feel inspired, full of love, and ready to make it the best year ever!