Technical difficulties

Hello, again, Blogger. It's been a while.

Dusting off this blog to let you know that my website http://birthfaith.org is having difficulties. Out of nowhere this morning, all of my blogposts and pages disappeared. For whatever reason I also can't post anything new over there.

I am holding out hope that my blog content can be recovered with the help of my brother/website designer. Unfortunately, I don't have my blog backed-up, though some of the posts are available through Wayback Machine's archive. Phew.

In the meantime, is it weird to ask you to pray for my blog? I hope not. Please do. Much thanks!

Morning sickness and Pitocin's potential hazards

Just a reminder to update your subscriptions and feeds to pull posts from my new website: http://birthfaith.org. If you haven't checked out my new website yet, here's a taste of what you're missing:

Preventing Morning Sickness

Most of what we hear about morning sickness is that it’s normal and even healthy for pregnant women. We’re given lots of tips for treating it’s discomforts–eating small, frequent meals, ginger, medication, etc. But what if morning sickness could be prevented or eliminated? In early pregnancy, a mother’s body is undergoing enormous changes. Her stores of vital minerals and nutrients (such as magnesium) are being sacrificed for her baby’s first crucial weeks of development. As alkalinizing minerals become depleted, perhaps her body is tipped into the acidic range of the pH scale? For women who start pregnancy with already acidic bodies, this could be even more pronounced and uncomfortable. Could morning sickness be stemming from that acidic environment? Possibly? . . .

Click HERE to read the full post.

Pitocin's untold impact

"[I]t is probable that, at a quasi-global level, we routinely interfere with the development of the oxytocin system of human beings at a critical phase for gene-environment interaction." -Michel Odent, MD

Oxytocin is the hormone of love and bonding and human connection. If the oxytocin system is damaged, or a child’s oxytocin receptors become desensitized, the ramifications are huge. A brain and body with an impaired ability to release or detect oxytocin sounds like misery to me. As more and more scientists study oxytocin’s impact, we can see how crucial our body’s oxytocin systems can be for human life, love, and happiness. . . .

Click HERE to read the full post.

Come on over!

Peace out, blogger

Alright, my friends. Today's the day I reveal my new website: http://birthfaith.org. Click over HERE for an exciting announcement followed by my latest crazy theory on preventing morning sickness.

There are still a few glitches with the site that I need to work out, but mostly I'm happy with how it's working and looking.  Huge thanks to my big brother, Kimball, for taking matters into his own hands to push me into my own domain and for all the help, late nights, and hard work in the creation process.

Please update your subscriptions on Google Reader (or wherever you might read my posts) to feed from http://birthfaith.org.  I have transferred over some of my most popular posts to the new site, but feel free to continue sharing your favorite posts from my blogger blog--they'll still be here. 

See you at the new locale!  And stay tuned for a contest in which I'll need your creative juices and will award some cool prizes.

About

We're back from vacation.  Missing these:

But sleeping in my own bed last night was bliss!  I've got a few blogposts in the works in my head, but I will probably be spending most of the day unpacking, doing laundry, and restocking my refrigerator.  So, in the meantime, I thought I'd give you a little sneak peek of part of my new website: the "About" page.  Just in case you've been wondering... who is this "Buscando la luz," anyway?

I'm a mom of three, doula-in-training, soon-to-be book author, lover of mountains and trees, wannabe photographer, and a Mormon. I have a school psychologist husband I call "Ax" in the blogosphere, two daughters born in hospitals, a son born at home, and a two-year-old shih tzu we call Boston. I grew up in a variety of places (Arizona, Utah, and Massachusetts), traveling often between divorced parents. I graduated in April 2003 from Brigham Young University where I majored in English (with an emphasis in editing).

In December of 2007, I turned to Blogger as an outlet for my passionate drive to share what I learned and loved about birth, taking on the psuedonym, "Buscando la luz." When I started that blog, I was coming out of a difficult phase of my life. I had spent the previous year or so full of anger and frustration about the world. Following my second daughter's birth, I became ill repeatedly, culminating in kidney stones. Those illnesses weren't surprising considering all the negativity and darkness I felt weighed-down by. Then we moved out of the basement where we lived to cute old house with lots of sunlight.

It was incredibly refreshing moving to that sunny little house. We had literally let the light back into our lives, but I still needed to let the light back into my heart.

Then one day I found and checked out a copy of Dan Zanes' album, Night Time!, from our public library. The pure joy and beauty of that music changed me. In his version of "What a Wonderful World," the end of the song has some lyrics not found in the original---a lullabye interspersed with Spanish phrases:

Sleep mi bebe, we are all here
Buscando la luz in the city
So that you may hear the laughter
El cantar y el gozar through the night
Arruru mi nene, arruru mi nena
Y que duermas con los angeles
Arruru mi nene, arruru mi nena
Y que duermas con los angeles

I loved how the song made me feel. I especially loved the Spanish phrase: "Buscando la luz en este mundo." It basically means, "Seeking the light in this world." The song and that phrase was exactly the mantra I needed at that time in my life. Seeking the light in this world. As I bathed in the warm light in our new home, I also began filling my soul with light and positivity. When I decided to take on a blogging psuedonym, I knew exactly what I needed to call myself: "Buscando la luz." And that's what I try to do. No matter how discouraged I become by the problems with maternity care in the U.S. (and other countries), no matter how many horror stories I am bombarded with, I'm not going to stop seeking out truth and light and goodness and sharing what I discover. I am and will forever be "seeking the light."

So you can call me Buscando la luz, or "Busca," for short. Or you can call me by the Hawaiian name my mom gave me nearly thirty years ago: Lani. And, coincidentally, this light-seeker now resides in the land of year-round sunlight--the Valley of the Sun, AZ.

Now I'd love to hear about you!

On loving baby slime

I don't have much time to write since we're currently on vacation, I've been busy working with my brother on my new website (still under construction...stay tuned for the big reveal), and we will be gone camping for the next couple of days, but I thought I'd re-post "First baths, etc." because I think it's on to something and some of my new readers might not have seen it yet.  Since writing the original post, I found a site that claims, "There are immediate and detectible [sic] changes in the hormone levels of mother and child when they smell each other."  I really wish they gave a reference, because I'd love to take a peek at more research on this subject.  Anyway... enjoy!

I've got this new theory. I'm not going to suggest that I'm the first to come up with this. It's only "new" in the sense that it's "new" to me. I'd love to see it tested with some research on mothers and infants.

A few weeks ago I got thinking about the profoundly intense bond I developed with my son following my home birth. I had never experienced anything like it. Sure, I developed a deep love for my daughters, but it took much longer and came far less naturally. I have come up with many possible explanations for the intensity of the bond with my son...

Read the rest of this post over at my new website!