We’re spending some time petting the indelibly soft skin of baby Dax Gregory, appreciating all of his squeaky noises, his wiggles and flails from the unconscious realm of newborn sleep, his ridiculously cute feet, his razor sharp fingernails…

And we’re recovering too, from all the unknown trials of having a first child, learning as we go along, crying when we need to, resting when we can.

We achieved our natural drug-free birth in the hospital, and yes it hurt, but it was also amazing and the craziest thing I have ever done in my life, but somehow also the most sane.

In relation to food and this blog — our hospital actually had good mostly-vegan options for meals! I ate three very tasty veggie burgers on whole wheat buns during our stay, with fruits and veggies on the side. They had tofu scramble and vegan soups and soy milk, and it was nice!

Related posts:

1. The Friendly Vegan
2. Cats as Casual Vegans
3. How to become a Vegan

No related posts.

It’s hard to believe that I am now “term” with Dax. We will get to meet him whenever he’s ready to meet us — which could be in a few days or several weeks from now. I’ll let him decide what’s best!

I just had a prenatal visit with one of the popular midwives at my clinic and I have to say that she is fantastic. All the doctors there are good, but she takes the extra effort to be very positive and encouraging. Rather than indifferently reviewing my vitals, she says that they look “wonderful,” and that makes me feel wonderful, probably making my vitals even better by reducing stress! Also, she explains what she’s doing rather than just doing it. Today she showed me how to gently feel Dax’s head near my pelvis and where to find his heart beat with a stethoscope when I said that I had had trouble at home with a friend’s stethoscope. She took the time to ask me what we wanted to happen at the birth and after, taking notes, and then lent her sincere personal confidence that I could have a natural, unmedicated birth. What a simple and invaluable thing to say!

support a midwife

If we had been able to financially, I know now that I would’ve opted to pay out-of-pocket for the exclusive care of midwives for a home birth. In a low-risk situation, pregnancy is not a “medical condition.” What I found myself wanting more than my blood tests and my blood pressure readings was the counsel and experience of a woman who knew what I was going through. Most midwifery practices visit your home and take a full hour for each prenatal visit — not for medical reasons, but to establish a good rapport, trust, and to talk about the pregnancy and birth of your baby. To read more about midwifery and childbirth, I strongly suggest reading Ina May Gaskin’s Spiritual Midwifery. Even if you aren’t interested in having a midwife or doing a home birth, the book is full of positive personal stories of birth and it’s a fascinating portrait of the community that Gaskin and others built in Southern Tennessee called The Farm.

I feel very lucky that I have access to midwives at all through Medi-Cal in Northern California. While I have yet to have a truly negative experience with the OBs on staff, I still get a little giddy before an appointment with my favorite midwife, because I know that it’s going to be an educational and empowering experience. After my appointment today, I (carefully) hopped on my bike again (still bicycling!) and went swimming and the positive experience I had had gave me extra motivation. I didn’t push it any harder than I usually do — I do gentle laps for 10-25 minutes, whatever my body/Dax says works, followed by 15 minutes of stretches in the deep end, and a nice back float for a few minutes with my eyes closed, oh to float — but I just felt stronger and happier than normal. Blessed! Pregnancy can be so trying between emotions and cravings and peeing and odd discomforts and pains and sleepiness, but the positive moments are amazing. (Like when I talk Greg into a foot massage!)

Related posts:

1. How We Eat
2. Bike to Work Week
3. The Friendly Vegan

More Important than How to Save Money?

How we spend money! We get most of our vegetables from a our local CSA. What we don’t get from the CSA, we select organic and try to aim local. Although I did buy my genmaicha (brown rice tea) from a Japanese tea farm. We’ve got a nice yard with room for our garden. We’ve got nice locks for our bikes, good helmets, and nice bike light sets. Money well spent. Thank God Kristen and our son have free health care, or we’d have to choose between paying the doctor and food.

Related posts:

1. Running with Cerebral Palsy
2. Average Water Usage? What’s Yours?
3. Affordable Ways to Eat Organic Part II

Cerebral Palsy (CP) is a physical disability caused at birth that affects 800,000 people in the United States. Cerebral Palsy is a broad term applied to anyone with a wide swath of motor skill problems. Some people with CP have difficulty speaking, which makes communication difficult. Many mentally impaired people also have Cerebral Palsy, but most people with CP are not mentally impaired. Even in 2010, Wikipedia has difficulty keeping the two straight giving the impression that people with CP are intellectually challenged.

Defying Stereotypes

This post will serve as a “sneeze page” or table of contents for inspiring people with Cerebral Palsy. Those of us lucky enough to have a mild impairment often go unnoticed, and can accomplish some pretty amazing things. As I write more about each of these people I will fill out this list with stories that I hope will hope inspire the abled as well as the disabled.

• John Quinn just retired from the Navy having kept his Cerebral Palsy a secret for more than 20 years. His biography is going to be an exciting read.
• Chris Broyles runs a 6 minute mile on his high school team. Can you do that?
• Connor Chadwick is an 18 year old cross country runner with an 8 minute mile
• Marcus Boyer made news for picking up cross country running in the 7th grade
• Nicole Lang competes well on her track team in the shot put event
• Katy Fetters enjoys hiking, charity push up contests, and writes a wonderful blog called Teen Cerebral Palsy
• Tina Matsunaga is an accomplished freelance writer with an English degree who keeps a blog on Living with Cerebral Palsy

Over the next week, I’ll be writing about each of these inspiring people as well as sharing exercise tips that took me from couch potato at 24 to athlete at 30.

My father always says there’s “no such thing as can’t.” So, why can’t you run a marathon? The next time you’re feeling too lazy to take advantage of the marvelous gift and ability you have, remember to cherish your gifts and look forward to the rewards provided by vigorous exercise.  Don’t let your body go to waste.

Make a Difference

If you find this inspiring, and want to make a difference, take a minute to link to me or, share this post with your friends on Facebook, Twitter, or e-mail. If someone had told me when I was 8 that I could be running in a marathon at 30, it would have changed my life.

Related posts:

1. Running with Cerebral Palsy
2. Streak Running and an Hour with the 6RRC
3. Why Do Runners Eat poorly?

Once an onion sprouts, Greg has a hard time cutting into it (like, emotionally). This is our onion (one of many as we love onions around here) last spring. We put it in some dirt and let it grow for awhile, harvesting some of its shoots now and then. It grew very tall in our front window and produced an interesting flowertop!

Related posts:

1. Urban Gardens
2. How We Eat
3. Cats as Casual Vegans

I’ve been guilty of a french fry bender, but now instead of repeating the behavior when I’m sick the next day, I strive to eat as much healthy food as I can.

Junk Food Drug Addict

Even worse than no longer feeling the negative signals from your body, you also lose touch with the reward signals in your brain! Just like a drug addict, pleasurable foods are no longer as good. Eating fresh, warm, ripe strawberries on a summer’s day is marvelous. However, if you eat junk food constantly, your experience of strawberries is greatly diminished.

Rats fed a high fat, junk food diet for 40 days not only ended up fat, but they also had a greatly diminished reward mechanism. The study actually found that rats would ignore pain to continue eating junk food in the same way that cocaine addicted rats will.

Eating a wholesome plant-based diet not only tastes delicious, but it helps you lose weight, regain energy, and feel marvelous.

*note: I disagree with most uses of animals for research, but I won’t ignore the findings. This study in particular was one that could have been done on humans, it would just have taken more effort.

Related posts:

1. Casein The Milk Protein
2. Healthy Eating for Kids
3. Publication Bias in Animal Research

I am still here, still pregnant, and having much more fun eating now that I’m 23 weeks along with things. I admit to still being much more “casual” about veganism than I had been prior to pregnancy, but I’m finding nice ways to temper that when I eat at home. My cravings ebb and flow. For a week, I was eating cheese slices at home, but found a nice way to up my fiber and vitamin intake while fulfilling that craving was to pair the cheese with apples and oranges and cucumbers sliced up and served to myself like an elaborate appetizer.

Greg is not a big fan of texturized soy protein products, and while I certainly don’t think they’re fabulous for me, I do find them to be a better alternative than running out and grabbing some real chicken nuggets, et cetera. Plus, for someone that kind of shies away from salads, they can be just an excuse to eat a lot of great veggies for flavor. Today I was cooking up a vegan burger patty and chopping up tomatillo, cucumber, thin yellow onion slices, and a small handful of red lettuce, when I realized I had way too many veggies to put on the bagel I had planned to use (I visualized them all falling out of the little hole) — So I grabbed a whole wheat pita, cut it in half, popped it in the toaster to make it warm and tasty, slathered it with hummus and a little salsa, cut up my burger patty into smaller parts and made a yummy hummus sandwich!

That’s all. Just checking in, Friends.

Related posts:

1. Community-Supported Agriculture
2. Farmers Market Report: Arcata, CA
3. Vegan Pizza Recipe

vegan in a non-vegan world

In the beginning of our food journey, we were very excited about what we were reading — It made sense, and it was research that clearly wasn’t favoring a corporation or industry, it was science that was on our side. Because of this, we were very enthusiastic about telling the people that we care about about what we were reading, The China Study, Food Revolution, Anti-Cancer, the research and the basic fact: vegans and vegetarians are healthier people. Plus, it had this exciting aspect of a life without supporting injury to animals. It all sounds so lovely.

Well, it turns out that even when people ask about veganism, they grow tired of hearing about it. And when you’ve just finished talking about how milk proteins have been proven to cause and exacerbate cancer cells, it can be awkward to grab a cup of coffee with your friend who enjoys a milk latte and perhaps a cookie made with butter and milk, as you sit there with your green tea and dehydrated fruit feeling like you’re coming off a little smug, even when you aren’t judging your friend.

the quiet vegan

It can be equally as challenging to be a quiet vegan, one who doesn’t make it well-known that he or she doesn’t eat animal products and casually accepts whatever restaurant their friends propose and doesn’t make a big fuss about being invited over for dinner. People will probably still ask you about why you’re not eating the cheese. (In Chicago, vegetarianism is so weird that I’ve been asked if I was a vegetarian just because a stranger on the street saw me eating fruit.) And there will always be conversations that revolve around food, which means meat for most people. I can’t tell you how many groups I’ve been in that enjoy discussing who serves the best hamburger in town. It’s only natural that people talk about what they eat — it lends to their enjoyment of their food. Meals are very fundamentally a social activity.

the people you care about

But the very most challenging position that I always find myself in is the one in which I am confronted with the food that the people I care a great deal for are eating, especially children.  Adults seem to spend a good amount of energy developing children’s food habits to include a daily intake of milk, not because they want the children to develop a taste for saturated fats and unhealthy proteins, but because they want the children to consume what they consider to be good for them: calcium, protein, and the vitamins with which the milk might be enriched. Unfortunately, we tend to eat in our adult life as we did as children, and I can’t help but daydream about children who are presented with whole grains, vegetables & fruits, and water on a daily basis, environments where the bad foods just aren’t present (because people will ultimately eat what’s available to them). But all this also goes for my parents. How hard is to hear about the meals that my parents are feeding themselves? My parents are important to me, so I want to hear about how they’re eating foods to sustain their health, et cetera. But I also want them to feel comfortable talking to me and telling me that they went out with friends for food and had a great time.

what kind of vegan will you be?

See where I’m going with this? These can be the most troubling aspects of being a conscientious vegan and deciding what kind of vegan to be. Non-vegans don’t generally like vegans who talk about being vegans. But at a certain level, you have to talk about being a vegan sometimes because it’s a big part of who you are. And at another level, you might feel it’s your responsibility to talk about being a vegan, because you care about your friends’ and family’s nutrition, or you care about the environment, or the ethical treatment of animals, and the chance for persuasion is more important than risking social awkwardness.

Being a vegan has added a complex layer to what I used to consider the most mundane information, e.g. Jill went out for ice cream. And being a vegan becomes a balancing act between the ease of my private diet and my feelings and actions in social interaction. There might be a lot of research indicating what is a healthy diet, but there’s nothing prescribing the right way to be a social vegan in a non-vegan world. So, it’s up to you — What kind of vegan do you want to be?

Related posts:

1. Vegan Oatmeal
2. George Laroque Vegan
3. Who says Organic Milk is Safe?

MSNBC also makes claims about Organic Milk. Their goal is to convince you than regular milk and organic are pretty much the same. The research for their article comes entirely from the Food Research Institute in Wisconsin which gets 1 millions dollars a year in “unrestricted gifts” from the food industry. You can imagine the kind of pressure milk researchers are under to keep up the good news about milk.

Consumer Affairs is the first website to say something honest about Organic Dairy. “[It] comes from cows confined to feed lots eating grain and not grass.”

Organic Milk comes from a Concentrated Animal Feed Operation, and the cows are subject to the same abusive animal practices that all animals are in our food production system. CAFO’s get the cows continuously impregnated so that they don’t stop producing milk. The cows almost never move from their stalls where they are hooked to milk machines their entire lives. The CAFO separates calves from their mothers in 24 hours so the calves don’t compete for milk with the humans. Many of these calves end up confined to veal cages for the rest of the lives. If they aren’t killed immediately.

The sad truth is that none of the easily findable websites will tell you the simple truth that Milk Gives you Cancer.

.

Related posts:

1. Casein The Milk Protein
2. The Skim Milk Lie
3. Is Milk Bad for You?