more about yesterday, procrastination, sleep, ABM marketing

Yesterday afternoon I attended a CE session called, "The Risks of Not Breastfeeding." I am learning so much here about the wonder of human milk and the many ways in which artificial baby milk just doesn't measure up. I did not know, for example, that the central nervous system is not mature until puberty, but that it has its most significant growth in the first two years, when a child should be nursing and should be receiving the good fats in human milk for proper myelinization of the neurons. I also didn't know that all the baby teeth are formed in utero and that once a baby is born it is using the calcium in human milk to form the permenant teeth. The second half of the session was about strategies for promoting exclusive nursing for six months. If we keep having large numbers of pregnant moms come to our group, I will have a chance to practice this!

Yesterday evening was the World Faire. Niels liked collecting the stamps for his "passport" and he really liked the music and dancing. He danced around and made friends with other kids while I bought some souvenirs and pins for our group workers. It was amazingly crowded there!

This morning I attended a session on co-sleeping with Dr. Paul Fleiss. I learned a few tips on how to ensure a better night's sleep but it mostly reinforced the necessity of sleeping with my babies. I'm very glad that I do!

The luncheon session was on overcoming procrastination. I certainly need help with that. The speaker was Rita Emmett, and she was very entertaining. I signed up for her tip sheet so maybe I can incorporate her strategies into my life and stop staring at the clutter in my house and wishing that I had taken the time to clean it up!

This afternoon's session was another CE session, this time about counteracting the marketing of infant formula. I am not going to have that many chances as a leader to do much about it, but I did learn a lot of the ways that the marketing is being done, and ways that I could complain to the FTC about the marketing that is misleading and to the FDA about the health claims that they make. DHA and ARA are not proven to make a baby smarter! On a side note, did you know that DHA is made from fermented microalgae and ARA from soil fungus and ARA is extracted with hexane. HEXANE! I did not know that and I am pretty sure that I wouldn't want anything with hexane anywhere near one of my babies. Would you? I didn't think so.

Tomorrow is the last day. On one hand each day seems very long, and on the other hand I can't believe that it's all almost over.