A New Kind of Day Plus Lucy's School Plus My New Obsession

This is a new kind of day for me already here at 7:48 am. As Rob and I were lounging in bed this morning at around 6:30 am, we heard little footsteps in the dining room and, lo and behold, Lucy had padded to the table and was waiting for breakfast. This NEVER has happened before in my memory. She was hungry and eager to get to school. Meanwhile Jasper, who I'd nursed at 4:30 am, is still asleep as I type. Another rare occurrence. And today Rob took Lucy to school and Grandma Gloria is going to pick her up. Jasper and I are going to go hiking with Meta and Kate. Jasper never has playdates of his own without bigger kids so this will be a first too. Hopefully this will be our Tuesday routine and I think I'm going to like it.

Speaking of routines, maybe it is because Lucy and I are not so naturally good at creating routines that we each seem to find a great deal of comfort in the routines of Lucy's school life. Yesterday, teacher Mary gave us a handout with a list of the activities for each day of the week. I love to read this list and Lucy loves to hear it read. Today Lucy and her class will take a walk to Good Shepherd's park, return to school and have a snack of organic oatmeal with lots of butter and maple syrup, have circletime (this usually involves a story or a song or a puppet show), play and do beeswax modelling, clean up and then have lunch. This is kindergarten. No math, no reading, no writing, no days of the week or time-telling. Just variations on the themes of play, clean up, and snack. We will see where it all leads.

Lastly on my mind this morning, I love to study nutrition and I think I am going to pursue a degree in microbiology so that I can really go deep into understanding how our bodies interact with food. This will come as a surprise to no one who knows me... I am almost always learning about some new dietary philosophy and I've circled back to one I used to read about and I am so into it that I'm going to write about a few of the principles here. The source is the Weston A. Price Foundation. Weston A. Price was a dentist who studied the diets of healthy traditional populations around the world and came to some interesting conclusions. The conclusions totally suit the way I prefer to eat, but all the science behind it seems to jive too. Plus it flies in the face of conventional "wisdom" and what the government says to do, which is usually a good selling point for me.

For starters, we should eat no refined or processed foods, particularly no corn syrup, white flour or hydrogenated oils. Secondly, that to be healthy we must eat properly raised animal products including fish and shellfish, birds, red meat, eggs, dairy - particularly focussing on the fatty parts such as organ meats, liver oils, butter and cream. All of the fat-reduced or fat-free dairy products are also under the category of refined and not whole foods, and therefore are not good for us. To properly absorb all the nutrients in the dairy, we need the fat. For all of the traditional cultures that were healthiest, they never ate lean meat or fat-reduced anything - that was food for dogs. Bring on the fat for them. The reason for eating all this animal fat is because they are sources of and also required for the absorption of vitamins A & D, calcium, iron, magnesium and copper. You just cannot get enough of the essential nutrients from vegan sources.

There is way too much emphasis on cholesterol levels in modern medicine. In fact, they recommend that people rom age 40 on be tested for vitamin B12 deficiency rather than cholesterol levels. B12 deficiency causes fatigue, sleep disorders, irrational anger, and tingling of hands and feet.

People are dying of cancer, heart disease and diabetes in record numbers because they are eating too many bad fats - heated vegetable oils and partially hydrogenated oils (these are the fats that predominate in clogged arteries), and not enough good fats such as fat from properly harvested or farmed seafood, the meat or milk of pasture-raised or wild animals, coconut and palm fruit. Olive oil and sesame oil are also ok, but the mass-produced canola, sunflower, safflower, corn, and soybean oils are bad news.

And there is so much more... Doesn't all of this just make sense? Basically, the more technology we create to tinker with the substances of nature, the less our bodies can recognize them and use them properly. And the move away from lard and to things like soybean oil and corn oil was more about a solution trying to find a problem (i.e. what to do with the abundant yields of soybean and corn crops because of the petro-chemicals used to grow them) than a problem (clogged arteries and cancer) finding a solution. OK, so I'm heading to take the placement test for community college math... soon.