The Green Family's Further Adventures with No Poo

I know the blog world has been up at nights wondering about the state of my family’s hair, and whether or not we have stayed on the no poo wagon. So here it is, the key to your future good night sleeps: my further adventures in no-pooing (not to be confused with Grasshopper's earlier problems with not being able to poo {solved by putting molasses in her cereal instead of multivitamins w/iron}).

First of all, needed to use the baking soda every day, or my hair would get overly oily, and this dried out my hair, which there is a lot of, but which is thin enough that just looking at a picture of the desert is apt to dry it out. The vinegar rinse helped a little. My hair wasn’t dry the way shampoo makes it – I mean, shampoo strips and dries, whereas baking soda just dried, at the same time it at least left some of the natural oils on my head. Sounds strange, but that’s what happened. Now having these oils has been a blessing: my hair looked fuller, was interested in doing a variety of things its untexured, overly-shampooed state had prevented, and was glossier.

While I liked this effect, there were a few things about using baking soda I disliked. First of all, I wondered if ultimately my hair was even more dry using baking soda than just shampoo. Secondly, it was awkward to take this method travelling -- powders just don’t travel well. Thirdly, it’s awkward having baking soda near water, and showers tend to have a lot of that. Last of all, I felt as tied to baking soda as I had to shampoo, and I was ostensibly trying out the No poo method…and I realized poo was just baking soda in this new reality of mine.

I was considering giving up, which was a hard choice since I liked my textured hair, and so I did what any desperate person does in this situation: googled “no poo” one last time. The second hit was something I hadn’t seen before, an article by Audrey Shulman, a reporter for The Phoenix, in Boston. Her method, which she says is Mexican in origin, is to wipe the left side of your wet head 100 times with a rag, and then the right side of your head 100 times. I’d heard of doing this with a boar’s bristle brush, but that never really worked for me. But since I was at wits’ end, I decided to give her particular method a whack.

I am happy to report that was in November, and since then, I have had a fabulous no-poo experience, devoid of baking soda. When I first started her method, I shampooed twice a week, now I shampoo once a week. This is far better than the baking soda, infinately better than using shampoo.

This is exactly what I do:

I put a wash rag on each hand (one of those rags sewn closed like a mit would be ideal, but I don’t have one.) Standing with my hair under the water, I grab my soaking locks with one rag, pull down, and then grab in the same spot with the other hand. I tried with just one rag and that took too long to get to one hundred, and was actually more awkward – two rags is easier. I do one side, then the other, and I go pretty fast. With the first hundred I try to cover all the hair on the left side of my head, the second hundred, ditto on the right. It takes three or four minutes. Like Ms. Shulman said in her article, my hair feels the way they tell you hair ought to in the TV commercials: soft, conditioned, not too oily, manageable. For zee first time in my life.

I haven’t gotten my act together to make some rinse with my essential oils, for a perfumed coiffure, but figure I will in the near future. Right now my hair smells like nothing, which is fine by me.

Grasshopper, by the way, still uses Aubrey Organics Baby shampoo once or twice a week. In between her hair doesn’t require the washrag cleanse, thank God, because I can’t even imagine trying to convince her two year old self to go for that.

Iron Poo and Potty Terrors

The quickest version of the story (and I need quick since we're so far behind...) is that the iron supplements the doctors have been insiting we give Grasshopper made her poo do it's best to turn into actual hunks of iron. The poo got to be so hard it hurt her to poo, and in a perfect world, we would have figured this out instantly and put her onto a stool softener (Miralax, which is what my sister-in-law, who is a pediatrician, recommended.)

What happened is that she began despising her potty -- at first she wouldn't sit down for longer than five seconds, and with time, the sight of it made her howl. We thought she had a urinary tract infection, and we went to the doctor. Of course, she wasn't up to peeing in a bottle, and so the nurses in the office tried to catheterize our already nearly-demented-by-anger baby. The moment they stuck the catheter tube in she managed to send a stream of urine directly into the nurse's hair, and to poo on the table. Oh so embarassing for mommy and daddy and nurse, mildly ameliorating for baby.

Because the world works this way, we were at the night clinic because the next evening -we were scheduled to get on a flight to Virginia. Greendaddy was due to be a groomsman in a wedding that weekend, and we had scheduled a few extra days around that trip so that we could also spend quality time with Greendaddy's brother and his family. We ended up at the night clinic when we realized that Grasshopeer wasn't being suddenly moody about the potty, and that there was a real problem. Unfortunatley, the doctor on duty had enough time to tell us he didn't think it was a UTI, but not enough time to help us figure out what was really at issue.

Since Greendaddy's brother M. and sister-in-law V. are both doctors -- she is a pediatrician, even -- we figured we'd get on the plane, despite the fact that the cream the doctor had given us hadn't helped Grasshopper feel a smidgeon better. Our trip to Virginia was tear-filled and painful for Grasshopper, Greendaddy and I were stressed and ready to strangle each other because of it, and our family was gifted the pleasure of five days of ailing, suffering two-year-old screams and matching edgy parents. After a few days there, however, V. realized that though Grasshopper was peeing regularly -- though unhappily -- she had stopped pooing altogether, and we went out and bought the MiraLax.

By the time we got home, Grasshopper was regular again. But she didn't lose her fear of the potty. She still refused to sit on it.

You have to understand that this was the first time in her life that she ever really regularly used diapers. We caught her poo and pee in a bucket from the time she was two weeks old, and as I've written before, there were less than a dozen missed poos in the last year -- almost none since she was old enough to walk to the potty and sit down on it.

In Virginia, we actually used paper diapers for the first time, because sometime in August we had sold most of her diapers and started putting her in training pants. The trainers were too thin to sustain all the peeing and pooing she was up to. Grasshoppre soiled diapers the whole weekend.

When we got back to Houston, though, we had enough spare, old diapers to switch her back over to cloth -- a move she protested, by the way. She was smitten with the absorbent nature of the paper diapers, which made it easy for her to pee and not be uncomfortable. So anybody wondering if cloth diapers really help with regular potty training: Grasshopper's experience suggests a resounding yes.

Of course, even though the cloth diapers were less comfortable when wet, she continued peeing in them for five or six days. In the end, I bribed her: I gave her dark chocolate chips when she sat on the potty, just two or three times, one day, which was enough for her to realize the potty was no longer trying to punish her. She started peeing again. But it took maybe a whole week and a half for her to start pooing in it.

Have I ever mentioned that I haven't carried diaper wipes with me, ever, because we ECd. If she pooed in her diapers at home, during this time, she'd squat and poo, and I'd immediately change her diaper with little mess. But a couple times during this period she pooed in her diaper while we were out -- and the poo got all over her butt, which, again, I have never dealt with with before (not since I babysat). I'd be in the middle of a store and gasp, "Oh my God! My baby just pooed her pants!" and then I'd have to watch people turn from me, to my nearly-two-year old, and then back to me again with this look: Duh, Mommy. What's your problem?

The internet suggested that potty regression is normal, and that it lasts two months. A thought that totally freaked me out, which in turn, made me feel ashamed: ECing isn't about forcing the baby to poo in a potty -- it's about allowing them to do what comes naturally. But since pooing in the potty was so normal for so long, I found it difficult to just be okay with the poo in the diapers. I never raised my voice or got mad at Grasshopper, but I was annoyed, and she knew that.

All this happened in a span of about two and half weeks. She's back to her normal self now, thank God, but we have to figure out a new way to give her Iron. She's not fond of Black Strap Molasses, and though I'm grateful to the MiraLax stool softener, I'm not about to make it part of her regular diet. Any helpful hints will be greatly appreciated.

(PS: Photos from our visit to Virginia -- and actual highlights of the visit -- to follow)

Car Seats in Asia?

Before we went to Thailand and India, we made an appointment with a specialist in pediatric travel medicine at the children’s hospital. After a long wait, the doctor told us that BabyG didn’t need any shots or extra vaccinations beyond what she already had, but then the doctor read off a long list of precautions we should take:

*Dress the baby in long sleeves and pants
*Apply insect repellent on all exposed skin daily
*Apply permethrin to the baby’s clothes (another kind of insect repellent)
*Avoid rural areas and contact with animals
*Give the baby mefloquine to prevent malaria (based on BabyG’s weight, she recommended a quarter of the regular tablet)
*Use a car seat.

“The number one cause of child mortality in foreign countries is motor vehicle crashes,” she said.

The bill for talking to this specialist, even though she didn’t give BabyG any medicines, was over one hundred dollars. I remember thinking, we better heed her advice since it cost us so much. MaGreen bought Ultrathon insect repellent, which worked very well. We soaked the clothes in permethrin instead of spraying it on, since it repels insects longer that way. The house started to reek of poison while we did this, so we shifted the operation outside. Apparently, once the permethrin has bonded to the fibers in the clothing, it is not known to be toxic to humans. We even packed a mosquito net.

But a car seat? How could we carry BabyG’s huge Britax car seat around Asia? In my previous trips to India, I had never seen anyone use a car seat. Even my brother and sister-in-law, who are very safety conscious doctors, didn’t use one with their son while in Asia. But the doctor’s words rang in our ears. Number one cause of child mortality. After all of our preparations and expenses, what kind of parents would we be if BabyG got hurt because we didn’t put her in a car seat? People wanted to take Britney Spears’ kid away from her because she got caught by the paparazzi not using one. So we bought a $40 portable car seat off the web. The user reviews were mixed, but the manufacturer said it could fit into backpacks and weighed less than 4 pounds.

In Thailand, none of the taxis we encountered had seat belts in the back seat. They seemed to have been cut out. The tuk-tuks, which are like rikshaws, were built without seat belts. And sometimes tuk-tuks were the only mode of transport available. When we went to Khao Yai National Park, we specially arranged in advance for a taxi that did have seat belts. After a long and difficult instillation, we managed to get BabyG in the car seat on the way there. But on the way back, she absolutely refused to sit in it.

In India, my cousin’s van was also built without seatbelts and by that time we were resigned to holding BabyG in our lap or letting her sit on the floor. According to one of my uncles, fatalities from crashes in India happen for completely different reasons than they do in the US.

Most of the time, in India, motor vehicles are rarely driving over twenty-five miles per hour, so collisions between small vehicles at high speeds, where a seat belt would really help, don’t happen frequently, he said. Sometimes cars get trapped between large trucks on the two-lane roads, he added, and then a seatbelt will help no one.

As you can imagine, I didn’t find this analysis very reassuring! And yet, we all survived – praise the Green Goddesses -- and BabyG enjoyed the break from car seats as you can see in the pictures. (When we passed cows on the road, she mooed with glee.)

Vicious Canines Attack BabyG

It happened in Utah, the second to the last day we were there. My cheerful, funny, walky little baby was mauled by what I think were two canines sometime between breakfast in my mother's hotel and lunch. It happened that fast.

What started out as a fever and mild crankiness, evolved into her most painful teething episode yet. It has meant a two hundred percent meltdown from a general feeling of discontent into an outright rage, several times a day, for the last 6 days.

Teething has always been hard for our little one. She refuses to eat anything but breastmilk, she gets diahrrea, she has 100.9 degree fevers, she wakes every couple of hours and requires long bouts of nursing...And these canines, they have been the worst. And I hear the most painful teeth to come in are molars.

I've decided to amass a list of green teething solutions. I'm going to say upfront that BabyG has been eating lots of Infant Motrin because nothing else I tried came close to working for her. We tried Hylands teething tablets, teething bisquits, teething toys.

However, I know there are levels of teething, and I know there are lots of remedies out there I haven't tried, and that might work alone for mild teething or (for us) augment the pain medication. Maybe there's a natural solution that will beat out Motrin...

So this is a general call: What teething remedies have you all used or have you seen used to good effect?

I've heard about: frozen bananas, vegetables, frozen washrags, clove oil. Anybody use any of these methods, or know anything about them? Teething post will be up in a week or so...

A Problem with Natural Parenting

I imagine that many folks who come by this blog think of us, and themselves, as natural parents. It’s a popular category. At least two major parenting magazines use the term “Natural Parenting” or something like it. There’s Natural Parenting and Mothering Magazine: The Magazine of Natural Family Living. There’s also the term “Nature Mom,” which I associate with a mother who is against circumcision, vaccines, pesticide-laden food, and products that use synthetic scents. I also think of nature moms wearing their babies in slings, co-sleeping, breastfeeding at Starbucks, cloth diapering, staying at home, home schooling, hiking, and hiding their TVs in the closet. I’m very, very sympathetic with many of these positions and practices, but not all of them. One reason we have called this blog Green Parenting is to develop new kinds of language to explore some of the difficult decisions where we don’t end up falling in the natural parenting category.

Here’s an example of what I am talking about. An article about the effects of lavender, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, made it to the headlines of major US news outlets a couple of weeks ago. (See the WebMD article about it.) I think one reason the story got so much attention is because it exposes a problem with the idea of natural parenting. The article reported that three boys who used lavender products developed breasts and when they stopped using the products their breasts disappeared. Lavender apparently boosts or mimics estrogen while hampering androgens. The findings indicate that lavender, like certain plastics and cosmetics, disrupts the endocrine system.

I don’t think this report should be a huge surprise to people who use lavender products regularly. It’s well known that lavender has a soothing and relaxing effect, which must be because of a rather sophisticated chemical (i.e. hormonal) interaction with our bodies. And it’s also associated with sexuality. So the report basically confirms folk knowledge. I still drink lavender tea. I like to feel relaxed. I guess my testosterone levels need some readjustment on occasion. But I’m not a pubescent boy. My body is not growing rapidly. My cells are not responsive in the same way as a fifteen-year-old’s. Parents have to pay special attention to both natural and synthetic products because children’s bodies are constantly in a state of transformation. If some boy wants breasts, I'm fine with him drinking lots of lavender tea. But we shouldn't fool ourselves about "natural" products.

Going natural does not guarantee good health. Nature can be toxic. Nature includes poisonous plants. Nature includes diseases like polio that cripple thousands of children every year. Naturalness should not exempt products from our careful scrutiny. I know most natural parents know this already. Most readers of Mothering Magazine are not dogmatic or inflexible. We try to be thoughtful, consider multiple sources of information, and balance our decisions. I just would like to see more discussion of how the term “natural” has its limitations.

Gonna Wash that 'Poo Right Out of My Hair

Please see the updated post by clicking on health at the bottom of this post, and finding the new article.

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There’s this line in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales about the Pardoner’s smooth hair that drips down in curls, and another about how the cook has a festering sore. Maybe I was smoking too many funny cigarettes in high school, because for many years I not only conflated the two characters, but I grossed out their appearances: I imagined there was a Chaucerian cook who was so disgusting that all the food he cooked was contaminated by his hair that was dripping with greasy, yellow oils and his sore that squirted puss. And sorry to say, this improperly combined, gross, imagined image is the only memory of the Canterbury Tales I took off with me, into later life.

It has come up because I’ve always had a friend or two who has decided to stop using shampoo, or to skip multiple days of shampooing. “Shampoo is just a capitalist consumerist conspiracy,” my friend Winona used to scoff during college. In Houston, my friend Chuck would say a little more humbly, “I find that if I don’t wash my hair, I don’t need pomades.”

For most of my life, I was terribly jealous of the likes of Winona and Chuck. Of people who could skip a day of washing their hair without looking like my nightmarish Chaucerian misread.

What I learned over the years, though, is that no matter what kind of shampoo I have used, throughout my life my hair has behaved more or less the same: it is thin; when shampooed daily, it is thin and brittle; when not shampooed, it looks like I put olive oil in my hair; also, it won’t grow past a certain length; it is flyaway and it never looks healthy. All these facts about my hair lead me to believe I was just another white girl with terrible, mousy, broken hair. Since I’ve read so much about the dangers of the toxins in shampoos, I was forced to buy super expensive shampoos (my favorite: Aubrey’s Organic Baby Shampoo).

And then, about a month ago, I read this article on “No-Pooing” – a name, I confess, I totally disdain. The writer I first read washed his hair with a baking soda solution, and conditioned it with Apple Cider Vinegar. Since I like mixing things together, and there is really nothing I can do to my hair to make it worse, I delved into this No-Pooniverse (can. not. resist. stupid. word. jokes. sorry. ch.).

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No-Poo Log, 2007:

#1: I washed my hair with 1 T. of baking soda dissolved into ¾ cup of water. As per the directions on the sites, I really massaged the solution into my scalp by first massaging around the crown, and then in the center of my head. I used no conditioner.
Result: Very clean, very manageable hair, slightly dry, though.

#2: I read that most people just mix baking soda into a hand paste before using. I tried this. And I also rinsed with 1 T. Apple Cider Vinegar and 1 Cup water.
Result: Hair was oilier than usual, but not gross with oil. It was sort of an interesting texture that held curl, and didn’t look brittle.

#3: I washed with the baking soda paste, again. I read that vinegar rinse should only be used on the ends of hair, and this time, didn’t wash my scalp area with it.
Result: A little less oily than before. I was not completely satisfied, though I already preferred this hair to shampooed hair, because my hair started feeling like, I don’t know, hair. I realized that my old hair felt more synthetic or something.

#4: Some people No-Poo by just skipping shampoo, but using conditioners.
Result: My hair was way too oily. The woman who suggested this was African American, though, and a lot of people on her site found it worked for them. Maybe it just doesn’t work on super fine hair.

#5: For about a week, I tried washing with varying amounts of the baking soda paste, and started skipping the vinegar rinse. I always needed 1 Tbs of Baking Soda: ½ I rubbed onto the top of my head, the other into the back.
Result: Varying degrees of hair feeling more oily than I had become accustomed to. Never hair I could go more than a day without washing, but hair that was much more manageable than it had ever been, previously.

#6: I washed with a lemon juice rinse (1 T Lemon Juice in 1 C water).
Result: Made my hair extra oily, again. But I was starting to worry because I felt like even when my hair felt more oily, it was also drying out the ends of my hair more.

#7: It occurred to me that my hair was the least greasy the day I mixed a T of Baking Soda into ¾ cup water. I had been assuming the paste was strongest in eliminating oil, but decided to test the assumption.
Result: Lo and behold: in the less concentrated version, my hair wasn’t oily at all. When I awoke the next day, even, it wasn’t oily. I didn’t have to wash my hair that day when I showered!

#8: I started using less and less Baking Soda in the ¾ cup of water.
Result: My hair needs about 2 t. full – 1 T. full dries it out.

#9: My hair was not oily everyday, but for the first time in my life, I worried it was overly dry. So I started using the vinegar rinse, and I added some rosemary essential oil – which strengthens and darkens hair.
Result: Voila! Hair not dry, not oily. But I can’t use this vinegar every day: more like every three days.

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There are a few really fabulous No-Poo sites out there. My favorites are BabySlime, and Motowngirl.   Pioneer Thinking offers various hair/skin recipes.  The No-Poo sites explain how there is a long process of figuring out what your hair needs: clearly, I’ve found this to be true. It has been enjoyable, though, experimenting. Now I keep a water-proof container filled with baking soda, a teaspoon, and a measuring cup in the shower.

BabySlime has a lot of recommendations for different rinses. I’m about to mix up a gigantic batch, so I won’t have to make a hair rinse every day. Even on days I don’t use vinegar, I’d like my hair to smell of something, so I’m experimenting w/different essential oils. Daily I’ll use that rinse, and some days I’ll add some vinegar or lemon juice.

And I love washing my hair. Because 2 t. of baking soda a day costs less than half a penny. Because when you actually massage your scalp with baking soda, or with rosemary oil in water, it tingles. Because even though I was totally screwed by shampoos for most of my life, at least I figured it out. Because my hair used to be this terrible, sad fate I would be sealed with forever, and now it is this fabulous, shiny, manageable cool-person hair.

Love Fest 2007: G(comm Unity)nting

BabyG's 1st year bash was, if I haven't mentioned, a six hour long open house. Long enough that I wanted to provide sustenence for my guests in the form of not only delicious Harvest Pumpkin Apple Cake, but Dilled Egg Salad Sandwiches, two kinds of cookies, and homemade Limeade. It was on a Saturday, and the following Wednesday, I cooked three lasagna's for GreenDaddy's surprise birthday (in which my surprise was upstaged by the mean intestinal bacteria some piece of food delivered GreenDaddy two days before...)

These party preparations and caring for the poor, sickened GreenDaddy arrived, as the best kind of stress and sickness does, at the height of the holiday season. Right when normal people are busy getting their winter plans, purchases, and/or trips in gear. For us, that meant preparing for a two week long sojourn to Utah and then to California, to see all our respective parents.

All this plus doting mightily on BabyG was enough to frazzle icecubes. But everything came off okay.

"But how!" I hear one of you dear readers gasping. "Good Golly," another is muttering, "Your family surely is a veritable mountain of unyielding force!"

Yes, we are. Thanks phantasmic reader, for noticing.

But how DID we survive? And why didn't the eldest heroine of this blog expire in a pile of lasagna noodles, pumkin puree, and happy birthday ribbons?

[MaGreen], my friend and loved one,

we'll be over tomorrow at the beginning of the party, and you should think of hank and i as people who you can call in the morning or before the party begins to get last minute whatever (including, "please bring a can of coke with you to the party").

we can also run errands, take out garbage, put out chairs, provide nonviolent conflict resolution, mop up pee puddles, open windows, change lightbulbs, turn compost, take things out of ovens, entertain children, and oil squeaky door hinges.

love,
ch.

It's that simple. I always want to write about how at least 50% of our ability to keep working at being green parents is a direct result of the incredible community that surrounds us. Our nurturing, loving community is the "reen Pare" in Green Parenting.

For those of you who want a way to help out new moms, or sick friends, or just friends who need a lift: copy above note, change the names, and send it off. (Well, better change some details in it, too, because otherwise it could have effects opposite of your good intentions. Chuck's note immediately lowered my blood pressure, and even now, weeks later, reading it makes me incredibly happy. Makes me feel inordinately lucky.



It wasn't only Chuck who saved my ass. Our friend Nicole did all sorts of decorating, last minute shopping, and lasagna baking. Janira helped me get the house ready. Heather came over and made cakes. Kayte brought her camera and took pictures of the 1st birthday(since our camera was missing that day). Keith and Theresa lugged over half a dozen or so extra chairs. And for the surprise party, all GreenDaddy's friends brought little and big somethings to augment the lasagna. And even the people who didn't "do" something, "did" something by celebrating the births of my two favorite people, and have "done" countless other life saving and wondrous things for us these past many years. Thank you.






The ever expanding sum of my friends' kindnesses reminds me that being green isn't just about using glass storage containters instead of plastic, or growing your own food, or creating less waste, or riding your bike to work. It's about nurturing the people around you so they can make their own green choices, or maybe choices more inline with their belief systems, but that you support because they're your people.

This is important for me to remember. My community enables me to work for what I believe without becoming pissy, angry, or poison because I'm greener, or peacier, or a better earth-lover than whoever. It keeps me going when I'm pooped, and it makes me want to be as fabulous to other people as my community is to me. Which is Good for Green.

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Sending this in to the scribbit Write Away Contest!

One Fun Thing

GreenDaddy and I are as busy as ever, and before he took BabyG to the Children's Museum, he said: "I'm going. But you have to work." He hesitated, said. "Okay, you can do one fun thing, but otherwise you have to work."

This is my one fun thing. I have three things to say:

1. I'm posting product reviews at Prop's and Pans.

2. In the process of deciding what to review, next, I chose our shampoos. Which led me on a snaking webhole of research and I ended up, gasp, deciding the three shampoos we love need to be nixed. I've gone no-poo in response. More on this to follow.

3. I also want to review Klean Kanteen's, non plastic, stainless steel sippy cups. They're the only sippy cups on the market you can get without plastic, folks! Before I write the review, though, I thought I'd ask if anybody else has used them?

Alright! The fun is over!

A Doozy: Ending Painful Sex Via Physical Therapy

This post was hard to write, because it's stuff I ordinarily wouldn't share. I mean, it's about sex. But I think it's important to get the information out there, so GreenDaddy and I both agreed I should post it. I tried not to be overly descriptive, while being exact. But if women’s “private” body parts make you squeamish, click on by.

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A few years ago, I was tortured by recurrent vaginal yeast infections. I’d have an infection, take mega-antibiotics so it would go away, and it would. Then, the exact same time each month, I’d get a new infection – which I often discovered the beginnings of when GreenDaddy and I were having sex. Because even the beginning of a yeast infection makes sex very, very painful.

For about three months we lived like this. Three months of me seeing a Gynecologist, who prescribed me a mega-pill that killed an infection for about two weeks. I was also ingesting acidophilus in countless forms: yogurt, little pills, etc. I read and followed many natural courses. Still, every month, on almost the same day, pow!

The fourth month, I told the doctor I was certain it was the birth control I started right before the infections, because the only thing that had been as regular in my life was my period. She’d never read about such a link, and convinced me to switch brands of pills. At month five, the same thing happened. Infection, cure, infection. We switched again. At month six, she said, “See, it’s not the birth control, it’s something else,” and she sent me to a specialist on yeast infections who prescribed sulphur vaginal suppositories.

I wasn’t into that, and gave up the pill, instead. The infections disappeared immediately. Which we assumed would save our sex life. No such luck. Sex continued to be painful in exactly the same way as it was when I had the beginnings of a yeast infection. Like the condoms were made out of the smallest grates on a vegetable grater. Very painful.

GreenDaddy certainly didn’t want to have sex, if every time we had it I felt like fainting from pain. It made him feel terrible, especially because he's rather fond of sex. And I didn't want to have sex, either, but felt terrible. And we were more or less, newly married. I felt broken. I felt like I was somehow cheating him, even though we had had a fantastic sex life -- I knew I didn't have an innate fear of sex -- until the infections started.

So I went to see doctors. “Buy lubricants,” they said. We did. It slightly dulled the pain. "GreenDaddy needs to be better at foreplay," they said.  Nope.  “Some women just always have painful sex,” they started saying then. Doctors, nurses: everybody nodded authoritatively, on occasion consolingly. That was just the truth as they saw it. I read all over the internet about vaginal pain during intercourse. Some people offered surgeries. Others concurred with the doctor: you’re unlucky, and you’re, forgive the pun, just screwed.

I did, thanks to lots of lubrication, manage to get pregnant. It was fairly painful – say a five on that list of one to ten – but I wanted a baby. Then, during most of my pregnancy we didn’t have any sex at all. A couple months after giving birth to BabyG, we had sex. We had hoped that shoving a giant baby human through my vagina might have miraculously fixed something. It didn’t.

On a post-birth visit to Lu, our midwife, GreenDaddy and I asked her for help. At this point I had talked to a dozen different doctors of different ilks about the problem. I had had so many appointments I didn’t even tell GreenDaddy about them all because it was just one disappointment after another. We were both scared. Because it looked like this was just the way it was going to be.

Lu set up an appointment for a physical. Of the many doctors I’d seen, only three others had examined me. Like them, unfortunately, Lu didn’t see any obvious problems…though I found the exam excruciatingly painful, and she could see that.

I was bearing down for her pronouncement: “Some women just have painful sex” when she actually said, “Well, it looks like you have Chronic Pelvic Pain. You’ll have to go see the physical therapists at the Women’s Hospital of Texas.”

Physical therapists for vaginas? Yes. The whole reason I am writing this post is that there is this group of women working as physical therapists, and they specialize on problems with the vagina, and nobody, not doctors, not nurses, almost nobody knows. I'm writing in case somebody thinks they either have to have painful sex forever or no sex, they really ought to go see one of these people. Because it worked for me.

I was terrified the first time I went in. Of course, the baby came with me, because it was the middle of the day. I was led to a room with a massage-like table, where relaxing music was playing. My therapist came in then, and I thought, “How’s this twenty-two year old girl going to do anything?” I lost spirit.

She examined me, which was weird and uncomfortable. After two years of pain that felt specifically like lacerations of some sort, I was pretty certain no massaging of the vagina was going to help. I thought I was incurable. But she didn’t. She said, “I think we’ll schedule eight visits. That should do it. We’ll start the first one today.”

During this and all other visits she massaged the new scar tissue I’d created giving birth, and she massaged parts of my pelvic floor that would spasm whenever something touched them. Basically, my muscles remembered the pain from having sex at the start of yeast infections, and wasn't letting go of the memories.

I won’t lie and say the treatment itself wasn’t as painful as the sex. It was. But after two visits, she said I should go home and have sex with GreenDaddy.

By this point, the thought of sex was extremely unpleasant to me, though. I couldn’t imagine it not hurting: it had been about two years without painfree sex. But I went home and did as she told me…and that pain that had been about an 8 (without lubricant) on her 1-10 scale became a 5. And over the course of the next few visits, the 5 became a three.

On various visits, my therapist talked about other things too: the use of dildos to aid in healing, and various products meant to enhance a woman’s experiences during sex, mostly liquids that stimulate the clitoris to help a woman lubricate herself.

And now, it’s been about six months since I last went, and sex is 98.5% painfree, I'm at a .5 on the pain scale and we don’t need to use the Lubrin even.

So far as I'm concerned, my therapist was a magician. I have never been so grateful to a healthcare provider.

And I think back about all those doctors, a few family practice doctors, but mostly Gynecologists and OBGYNs, who told me there was nothing to do about having pain during intercourse, who didn't hesitate to relegate GreenDaddy and I to a life in which sex was either painful or nonexistant.

And I think of all the women experiencing vaginal pain and believing there is no hope.

And I realized that the reason doctors don't tell women about these therapists is because they don't know.

So I decided to write this post, hoping women in pain, their partners, their healthcare providers...people who need it will find it. And help women experiencing the sort of hell I was to find a solution.

If you want more information: Women's Hospital of Texas or google: chronic pelvic pain physical therapy (your city).

It's worth it.

Introducing our New Line of Blog Action Figures: GreenDaddy, MaGreen & BabyG

Last week GreenDaddy suggested that we'd have to kill Green Parenting for when I go out on the job market next year, because if people Googled my name something might spook them. So that night I painstakingly changed all our names to fit the others in BlogLand. It’s only half done…the rest will soon follow. I had been considering doing it anyway, because I can’t stop worrying about the saftey of posting both pictures of BabyG and her name. I figure I can get away with one or the other, safely. I love the sound of her name, I love writing it…but I would rather post photos.

This issue brings up what I can already see will be a great challenge for me as a parent: naming boundaries in the name of BG’s safety. I’m not a real rule-maker sort of person; I don’t want to be over-afraid. But because of mistakes I’ve made in my own life, I know I error in the direction of not-enough-consideration-of-possible-dangers. I want to be more thoughtful, more wise in choices I make for BG.

This choice making comes up in so many different ways. In the simplest of ways, it’s just letting her explore. The other night we were at a restaurant, and she was standing up on the booth, holding onto the edge of a cement table. I worried she was going to slip and hit her chin on the cement edge, even though I was right next to her and she couldn’t fall far or hurt herself badly. But I wasn’t hovering over her, I wasn’t that vigilant. If she slipped I knew it would hurt, but I thought it was better to let her explore, to stand there, to be a baby. And then she slipped and banged her chin, and she bit her lip and she howled. And I felt so stupid and terrible. The woman sitting next to me said, “I was waiting for that,” and gave me a tsk tsk look.

I tried to explain that it’s so hard deciding what to let the baby try. Or how hovering you should be. But she just looked at me like I was insane.

A much more complicated issue of choosing boundaries and dangers your child your face is in discussing immunizations, an issue we somehow missed discussing on Green Parenting. There are three camps: 1) Don’t immunize because the shots might be detrimental to your childrens’ health (especially if they contain Mercury, though are made without Mercury now; you can ask your doctor what kind of shots he/she gives); 2) Pick and choose what you’ll give the baby…some might give babies shots for the most serious diseases, but not “mild” ones, and others might not give babies shots for sexually transmitted diseases; 3) Immunize completely because you don’t want your baby at risk for a preventable disease for the rest of his/her life and because the older they are, the more difficult it is for them to take the shots.

For me, this issue is about choosing between two evils nobody wants to think about: poisoning your baby accidentally or not preventing their susceptibility to a potentially life-threatening disease. You hope neither will happen, and probably neither will. I prefer the possible accidental poisoning, because I think it’s less likely to happen than the other. But I don’t know what is in the shots, exactly; they might have had adverse effects. I just don’t know, the way I don’t know exactly the effect of a medicine on me twenty years from now. But I take it. It is risky. I know they've changed vaccines because of the protests of parents over the last two decades -- they're much safer. And vaccinating BabyG means she won't be spreading diseases to other peoples' children. Also, BabyG will probably be traveling in countries where there isn't a vaccine blanket, like there is in the US. I'd also rather know now if something goes wrong, than spend my life afraid I've set her up for a gigantic disaster. What if she got polio? How would I explain that to her? I'll always remember my grandma's description of caring for five babies with whooping cough, two of whom nearly died…because her sister convinced her not to vaccinate them. It turned her completely off to "natural" parenting of any kind.

I really worried about giving the vaccines, and luckily, they didn’t bother her at all. I cried when she got them, though. It was so frustrating to do tons of research, and to find no clear-cut answer. Proponents of either side of the issue implied the parents on the other side were negligent or worried about the wrong thing. But many of my friends swung the other way, and didn’t vaccinate at all. They were just as worried about their choice as I was. There wasn’t an easy choice. This choosing the better danger; this choosing the boundary business in the name of a defenseless baby’s, my defenseless baby’s livelihood is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

Anonymizing on the internet is another aspect of these boundaries. We chose, at first, not to be anonymous. I was always worried about that choice, though. It’s less clunky to use real names; it’s more ‘real.” But I always felt slightly uncomfortable. The gamble is that no crazy freak will come after the baby we named and posted photos of on the internet. Probably none ever would have.

But how would I explain to my child that I just felt safe...oops…if all this backfired? Or explain it to myself if something went even more wrong? It’s easier for me to be experimental with things like her falling and bumping her chin. And the funny thing is, it’s much more likely she’ll fall and bump her chin in a certain scenario, than she’ll get a disease or she’ll be bothered by a crazy internet viewer. And I allow her more leniency to fall in situations where the fall is likely; my fear is greater in these things like immunization or random crazies, they’re so much less likely, but the stakes are so much higher.

So now we're named like a superhero family, which I guess we can handle. I still have more names to change, and then it’ll probably be several months before you can’t find this website through our real names.

If it hadn’t been such a pain to change so many names, post by post, I would have had a contest to choose the best names for our family. I didn’t think of that until too late. GreenDaddy did think of choosing names similar to our real ones…Roy, Myra, and Lola or something. But in the end we both preferred being obviously anonymous to being secretly so.

This post is all over the place, I know. I’d love any advice on how to make good boundaries. On when to know if you’re loopy with ridiculous fear or loopy with ridiculous fearlessness. And does anybody know if there’s a find and replace feature that can be attached to Blogger?