Porridge

That's what my brain feels like most days. But while Georgie has moved from colic to teething, things are generally easier in the Gascoigne house and I've managed to carve out a wee moment to actually make a blog entry! This is partly because Georgie, while more sensitive than Theo, and, as I discovered, far more reliant on a consistent nap schedule, is actually much more independent than he was during her waking hours. At not even 6 months yet she is crawling (more or less--and a good four months earlier than Theo did) and I find that if I baby proof the floor I can usually leave her there to play for most of the morning by herself.

It is also for that reason that I've felt free to experiment with cooking again. This recipe for porridge is one I got from my Nourishing Traditions cookbook, which focuses on traditional methods of food preparation as opposed to processed "food products" and so-called healthy recipes that cut out the fat-- and all the other things that are actually good for you. This recipe requires a little forethought but is worth planning ahead for. I'm not a carbs-for-breakfast person usually but since everyone at my house likes this so much, and it is also among the cheaper ways to eat a filling breakfast, I thought it was worth posting. Plus it's adaptable for fasting.

You'll need:

A cup of rolled oats (not quick oats)

2 cups of warm water

1 tbsp of full fat probiotic balkan style yogurt, or lemon juice

a pinch of sea salt

pinch of cinnamon (optional)

The night before (or the morning before) add one cup of warm water to the oats. Add the yogurt or lemon juice and stir. Cover them with a towel and leave at room temperature overnight. The water and the acids from the lemon juice or the whey in the yogurt will soften and sort of predigest the oats while they soak, making them quicker to cook in the morning and also easier to digest (plus yummy). In the morning add the other cup of water and the pinches of salt and cinnamon, and cook the oats for 5 minutes or so until done.

Now the best part is really how you serve this and with what. We are in the habit of pouring a few tablespoons of cream (either cereal cream or whipping cream--single cream for those in Britain) and topping it with maple flakes (dried maple syrup) and raisins. But you can add anything you like. Fruit, nuts, flax seed, syrup-- you name it. If it is a fast day simply prepare the recipe with lemon juice instead of yogurt and instead of adding cream use coconut milk. Viola! The yummiest porridge ever.

Adventures with two

I thought I was brilliant at kid juggling--two is a whole new level. I should have expected that. After a seriously difficult first few weeks we finally began to settle down and deal with the unique challenges posed by a second, very different child.

Firstly, my days of coffee chugging are indefinitely postponed. What I tried and failed to give up in Lent I have been forced to give up after Georgie's birth. Georgie began to appear colicky by three weeks and by five weeks I was so fed up I told my midwife about it. She suggested I give up my coffee habit. I was rather skeptical that coffee was the cause since it never seemed to bother Theo, but even one day off coffee brought miraculous silence to the evenings.

Turns out my little princess is of the fairy tale variety--delicate enough to feel a pea under her many mattresses. She's incredibly sensitive. A change in light, position, noise will easily wake her. We can't put the stopper in the kettle without waking her. And very sharp or loud noises make her burst into tears. She's also very sensitive to our moods. If we're stressed or frustrated she instantly begins to fuss.

She is so different than Theo was that I feel like I'm starting from scratch-- except this time I have a rambunctious toddler creating chaos ever time my back is turned. Georgie is not only far more sensitive than Theo was but none of the things that used to calm him work for her. We've had a terrible time introducing dummies. Of the plethora of infant size dummies I have tried she likes exactly one and I haven't a clue where to get one the same shape since it was given me by a friend. However, whereas Theo hated the swing, Georgie generally loves it.

She also hates sleeping on her back which has presented me with a serious dilemma. For those out-of-the-loop it is now considered a great parenting sin to put a baby to bed on her tummy since it is believed that this is a risk factor for SIDS. (When I was babysitting infants as a teen it was considered wrong to put them to sleep on their backs lest they should spit up and choke.) Theo was easily comforted by swaddling so it was never a problem. I swaddle him and put him on his back and go to sleep with an easy conscience. Georgie likes to be swaddled too (thank God) but it is rare that swaddling will keep her settled enough to sleep on her back. So do I follow the rules and risk killing her in a sleep-deprived rage or let her sleep on her tummy the way she wants to and risk SIDS?

My very wise midwife is convinced that tummy sleeping has nothing to do with SIDS, but rather the chemicals and fire retardants in commercial mattresses which a child inhales more of in their sleep if they are on their tummy. Scientists say that babies sleep more deeply on their tummies and if they are prone to sleep apnea (where they forget to breathe for a minute or two) they may completely forget to breathe and die as a result. Therefore we should keep our children as badly rested as we are--just in case. I'm finding I put her on her tummy a lot though I will try her on her back if she seems really out of it. I console myself with the fact that she actually sleeps in our room and very often right next to me in our bed so I am likely to notice if something is wrong.

Adding to the chaos around here is the introduction of the bunk bed as Theo's new place to sleep at night. We had half-heartedly tried to get him to sleep there at nap times for a while and only ever put him down in it if he was already asleep but he'd been so traumatised when we took the side of the crib off that we were reluctant to put him in the bunk bed at night. Given enough time in the crib he always fell asleep on his own-- but it's been a battle with the bed, At first he was scared if he woke up there. Then just scared if he went to bed there. Now he's perfectly happy to get out of bed, switch the light on and run out into the kitchen with a money grin and a giggle. He knows better though and if we ignore him long enough he will occasionally go back to be on his own. But he falls asleep late as a result.

We're also trying to potty train him which is proving a laborious task.He seemed a little interested at first, but quickly discovered how boring it was. The trouble is that my husband has now completely lost patience with dirty diapers since the one or two initial successes and got very angry when Theo refused to sit on the potty and then pooed in his pyjamas the minute our back was turned so now he seems to think going poo is bad and he isn't allowed to do it. We'll be lucky if we make any progress at all in that department this year.

It's partlyfor that reason and partly because Georgie is so sensitive that I've begun something I had heard about before and thought was completely nuts: Elimination Communication, or EC--also known as infant potty training. I was utterly gobsmacked by how easy it is. I thought it would be a pointless, messy, waste of time. But it's not like that at all. The theory behind it is that infants are born with an awareness of their elimination needs and have the instinct not to soil themselves-- they do not have much control over it however, and communicate using various signals that they need to go. They squirm or grunt or fuss or wake suddenly from a nap. So you pop them on the potty when you think they might need to go and cue them with a "pssss" noise and believe it or not-- it works! As they grow they retain their awareness of their elimination needs and soon associate the cueing noise and the position you place them in with the sensation of going to the bathroom. They wait for it. And soon they are old enough to learn the sign language to tell you they need to go--voila! Children who are conventionally potty trained however, lose their bodily awareness some time in the first year making potty training ridiculously difficult. We end up with Theo, completely unaware he's going-- and far too busy playing to care anyway.

Originally i chose to start EC with Georgie as a means to spark Theo's interest, but now I've started it I actually prefer to using diapers most of the time. Of course I still keep her in diapers-- I just pop her on the potty when I think she needs to go and she almost always does. There are exceptions. I don't get up at night to take her to the potty (I'm not crazy) and when we are out and about I just let her go in her nappy and make the cueing noise in her ear if she does. But while we are at home I try to pay attention to her signals and use the potty frequently. It's bizarrely gratifying to watch her on the little blue potty grunting away.

I've had some scathing criticism about it. Namely that infant potty training is really just training the parent-- which is utterly ridiculous. As if responding to my daughter's need to use the toilet is letting her train me.First of all-- she's two months old and has no concept of manipulation and therefore cannot "train" me. Secondly, I feed my daughter when she is hungry and change her when she is dirty and burp her when she has gas--why is responding to her need for the toilet any different? I don't mean to imply that those who use diapers are somehow neglectful of their child's needs-- we do what we can. It's a busy modern world and plenty of people haven't the time or energy. I personally won't get out of bed at night for it. Diapers are just fine. But having a clean bottom is still a basic hygenic need and whether you choose to fulfill that need by changing your baby's nappy or putting her on the potty is really up to you.

So the chaos has increased in my life. All kinds of new adventures...

Triumphal Entry, Passion Week, Resurrection--How Georgie arrived

Less than a month after my last post I gave birth at home to a lovely baby girl who we named Georgina Frances (Georgie for short). The labour and delivery were so miraculously perfect and predictable that we were entirely unprepared for what followed and I'm still sort of trying to work out how I feel about it.

I went into labour before my due date this time (I was late with Theo) but almost exactly when I expected to. I had a feeling the baby was going to be early by a few days and that I would be bringing her to Pascha so it didn't surprise me at all when I started having contractions on Sunday afternoon. By one am on Monday morning there was no denying the pain and I called my midwife who came to check and be certain. I was only two centimeters so we weren't in a rush, and the contractions weren't all that bad. My midwife wasn't convinced I would even have the baby that day. We had Theo picked up by his grandparents just in case and partly because I was fairly certain that delivery was imminent. I then rang my best friend and my doula and told them to come over.

At 11:30 am my midwife recommended I go for a walk to get the contractions going-- something I was reluctant to do because I had either forgotten how painful they could be or I was just too out of it while I was in labour with Theo to notice. But I went anyway. We got the mail and bought some chips at the corner store. When we got back my midwife said she still wasn't sure I would have the baby that day. By 1 pm I was on the bed pushing Georgie out, and she was born at quarter past. I think I was pushing for maybe 10 minutes. The other midwife barely made it in time to help catch.

It all happened so fast and so beautifully, the way I had hoped, sun streaming in the bedroom window on Holy Monday afternoon, that I was completely unprepared for what happened next. The moment Georgie was born it was clear that something was alarming the midwives. Instead of giving her to me they were asking each other questions and I heard one ask "Was that on the ultrasound?" Eventually they put a very purple screaming baby on my chest, but as I looked down I noticed that my midwife's hand was firmly pressing down on the baby's belly. At this point I didn't even know the sex of the infant bawling on my chest and everyone was so distracted with whatever the trouble was that it took a couple of minutes for someone to tell me it was a girl.

I caught sight of what my midwife was clearly concerned about-- a large protrusion on the baby's belly. I had seen and heard about umbilical hernias before so I wasn't too shocked or worried at that point--I knew they weren't meant to be cause for much concern, but the midwives clearly thought it was necessary to call the ambulance. I was assured by my midwife at that point that she didn't think it would be a problem since there was skin covering it and that it certainly wasn't life threatening. Nonetheless, there was enough of an upset that it took until after the ambulance arrived for us to worry about the placenta delivery and none of the usual measurements and exams were done until we got to the hospital.

The pediatrician at the hospital examined her and determined that the doctors and surgeons at BC Children's Hospital would want to examine and possibly operate on her before we would be allowed to take her home but that nothing very serious was likely to be wrong. We were transferred to BC Children's Hospital where it took 2 and a half days for the various doctors to determine that there was nothing wrong and the muscles in her abdomen had simply failed to grow together.

In the mean time Greg and I were set up with a family room in the neonatal unit where we were left almost no information from doctors and at best conflicting if not downright useless information from the nurses. Georgie was hooked up to monitors and a sugar IV and left in an incubator with a dummy in her mouth. After 12 hours they had determined she was safe to breastfeed and after 24 hours they finally told me I could breastfeed. It was practically impossible though because she was hooked up to so much equipment that I couldn't cuddle her or swaddle her to settle her long enough and of course she wasn't all that hungry because of the IV--which the nurses refused to remove because my milk hadn't come in. How my milk was going to come in when she wasn't hungry enough to nurse was beyond me.

I was stunned by how ignorant some of the nurses were about breastfeeding, but of course there is little you can do to argue with them. One nurse asked, when I was unsuccessful getting Georgie to nurse from me, if she could give her formula in the night. I drew the line at formula feeding and frankly told the nurse that if the baby was really hungry then she would eat breastmilk and that there was no danger of her starving if she was being shot up with sugar-water. I was furious. And course I was busy with using a breast pump to bring my milk in quicker --something that would have been entirely unnecessary if they'd been sensible enough to remove the gratuitous IV in the first place.

The second day at the hospital we were finally informed that the results from her heart ultrasound showed everything in perfect working order so we felt relaxed enough to leave the hospital and have a somewhat celebratory lunch at a sushi place. But we hadn't seen anyone all day and they were still testing things we knew nothing about. Nursing wasn't going well and by that night we were both so upset with the lack of news and the waiting in our pokey room and the bullshit being fed to us by the ignorant nurses that were decided we REALLY wanted to get out of there. The plan started out as coffee and quickly turned to beer (good for nursing right?) but since it was so late at night already nothing was open and we were so desperate to DO something that we drove all the way home to Langley to raid our own fridge. At least we felt like we were accomplishing something.

By the third day we finally caught the surgeons doing their rounds. They were able to enlighten us as to everything that was going on and finally put our minds at ease. Up until then we had only had short, highly uninformative exchanges with various doctors who were ordering different tests. We knew they were looking for other birth defects, namely heart, lung, and intestinal defects. The cardiologist had briefly mentioned, as he passed right by us without looking at Georgie, that her heart ultrasound came back fine-- as though this explained everything. But since we were completely uncertain exactly what they thought what might be wrong in the first place we'd been left to imagine and fear the worst.

Turned out, according to the surgeons, that Georgie's birth defect was exactly what it looked like--just a gap between her abdominal muscles. There was nothing else the matter and the final ultrasound was being done that morning to determine if there was a hole in her diaphram which the heart may have slipped through. If there was a hole however, it wouldn't pose any threat to her, simply delay any possible surgery since they would want to wait until she was older to ensure her heart would have enough room to grow before they put it back where it belonged.

In fact almost all of the tests they had ordered were simply to determine the best time and method for surgery rather than if there was anything likely to threaten her life or leave her with a disability. After they had found that her heart and intestines were whole and functioning (which they had confirmed within the first 24 hours) all the other blood tests and scans were largely just gratuitous routine monitoring or else simply to help them decide when or if to schedule surgery and precisely how they were going to do it. If we had known that at the time we would have felt a lot less panicked and frustrated. And I would have insisted they remove her IV and allow me to dress her and take the other monitors off. Instead we were left for another whole day to wonder and worry.

We were so relieved to hear that she was fine and were told that we would be able to take her home that day--even though our previous night's trip to Langley saw us packed for several more nights at the hospital. They performed their few gratuitous blood tests while we went to get breakfast. My midwife turned up at the hospital and thankfully managed to corner the doctor who was to discharge her and got the whole scoop--as well as the job of post-partum care. We finally felt ready to relax and celebrate. Friends turned up to visit at the hospital and we were able to tell them the good news.

We brought her home that night and were told to take her in to the local hospital for one more test the next day. She was slightly jaundiced. But we weren't concerned and were happy to show her off the people turning up at church for Holy Week services. Theo finally came home and met his new sister and the first thing he did was give her a kiss.

The next two days we tried to adjust to the new situation. People visited, Greg did paperwork. We tried to get Theo settled down. He was completely out of routine and a bit short tempered and uncooperative. Meanwhile nursing was proving a bit of a challenge, though she was gaining weight. And the pediatrician was rather unhappy with her bilirubin levels. By Friday afternoon all hope of getting things back to normal had vanished and we were told we would have to take her back to hospital to treat her jaundice and perform MORE blood tests. At this point we were so depressed. Theo was completely beside himself with all the upset and we were far too exhausted to be patient with him.

The idiot nurse at LMH informed me we would be giving Georgie formula and was less than impressed when I indicated it would be over my dead body. Later the pediatrician told me we would have to "top her up" with formula only to make sure she was over-hydrated so the bilirubin would be flushed out more quickly, but in the mean time I was welcome to use the pump and bottle feed her whatever breast milk I could. I called my midwife in a panic and she wisely told me to just comply for now and get the heck out of the hospital--and out of their control--as quickly as I could.

To my delight, Georgie was almost completely uninterested in formula. My breast milk was almost always enough and she didn't like using the bottle much either. She nursed quickly enough for me to be able to take her out and feed her directly from the breast a few times, which was encouraging. But Greg wasn't allowed to stay with me in hospital this time and the doctor was not forthcoming as to how long we would be there. We weren't sure if we could even make it to Pascha.

To add to things, my body was quickly returning to pre-pregnancy shape and while it was nice to sleep on my almost flat tummy and have my cramps and varicose veins rapidly disappear, I was beginning to feel like the whole pregnancy had never even happened. Like I'd fasted for all of Lent and had to miss Pascha. Here I was, stuck in hospital, alone with a baby I wasn't allowed to bond with and had no idea when I could take her home.

Of course, as my dad AND my midwife reminded me-- it was Holy Friday. And of course I knew it wasn't the end of the world. Plenty of kids have jaundice. Greg and I both had it. And we were incredibly lucky that Georgie's hernia was covered with skin. My midwife had a client whose baby didn't have skin covering the gap in his abdomen and it was the grace of God that saved his life. The mother had been planning a home birth and she was lucky my midwife had been uncertain enough about the baby's position to order an ultrasound at 34 weeks. The scan revealed that all of the baby's organs were outside his body. She was flown to BC Womens and given a c-section, the baby was operated on immediately and her little boy was perfectly fine. But, like me, her 18 week scan had shown no irregularity in the baby's abdominal wall. And, like me, she had been planning a home birth. If my midwife hadn't double-checked the baby's position, her baby might have died. So I knew that in spite of the misery I was experiencing, God had been taking care of us.

But I couldn't understand why God wanted me to experience this challenge. I'm still not sure. Perhaps it was to help me appreciate the true reality of Holy Week, or perhaps it was to show me that He was taking care of me even when it felt like He wasn't. Or perhaps His purpose had nothing to do with us at all. I'll probably never know. But all I could think of at the time was that for some reason God didn't want us to go to church or be at Pascha-- and that was the hardest part to figure out. There could be any number of reasons for allowing us to experience the doubts and fears every parent goes through when their child is in hospital, but why keep us from the only thing that might help us to get through it?

As it happened, we DID get to bring our little girl to Pascha after all. My midwife--also Orthodox--arranged with the pediatrician to have us temporarily discharged so that we could bring Georgie to church for the midnight Pascha service. We returned to the hospital at 4am after the Paschal liturgy and later that morning she was permanently discharged as her bilirubin levels were back to normal.

We came away from the whole thing with a very unique experience of Holy Week that few could relate t0-- a true triumphal entry followed by a week of fear, doubt, disappointment and darkness, only to have everything restored to us in the end. It did not feel like we had really been given our daughter until Pascha. And maybe that's what God wanted for us-- to be able to welcome our daughter with Him. I don't know. But He resurrected our joy with Himself this year.

Sunday morning shut-in

The beauty of living next to church is that you get to experiment with how to wrangle your toddler and manage to make it to all the services with comparative ease-- a luxury that most of my mum-friends don't have.

But with that comes the temptation to feel that you can and SHOULD make it to every service. After all, it only takes me two minutes to walk to church. And that's made it rather difficult for me to accept the idea of taking my 40-day break from church after the baby arrives.

For those of you who don't know, the Orthodox church prescribes a 40-day fast from church, as it were, for women who have just given birth. This is not because, as some might think, that the church thinks of childbirth as an unclean thing. It is not a banishment, but rather a sort of recommended holiday or permitted absence from church to allow new mothers time to bond with their babies.

I know I am not alone, however, in feeling resentful about this particular requirement. It's hard not to feel banished and I know a lot of women simply choose to ignore this rule, however common-sense it might be. Parenting is incredibly isolating at times so it can be a hard rule to accept.

And because my baby is due the week before Pascha this year, I have been determined to go to every service I possibly could regardless of whether it conflicted with Theo's bed time or I had the energy to go. My mother told me to just admit defeat and stay home and I guess she was right because after Presanctified Liturgy on Friday poor Theo started throwing up and hasn't stopped. It's all been too much for him. So this Sunday I sit at home watching Wallace and Gromit for the millionth time while the service is going on 50 feet from my door.

It's difficult for me to remember or accept perhaps that sometimes taking it easy is the least selfish thing I can do and I think that applies to a lot of modern women. We don't like to admit that kids just mean less freedom for us--even if we want to use that freedom for something like going to church.

So perhaps that's what God wants me to learn this Lent: to accept that parenting is the way God wants me to serve Him--even if it means I have less freedom to go to church or opportunities for fellowship with other parishioners. I need to learn that mothering is it's own form of Christian fellowship.

A Journey of Obedience

So I've been thinking a lot about fasting as you know, and my husband said something that really made me think about it from a different perspective-- one which I think makes a lot of sense. He said that he wouldn't be giving up anything for Lent that wasn't required-- that he was just going to do his best to be obedient to the existing rules, and that to try to be better was setting himself up for frustration and disappointment.

Now, it has occurred to me recently that as Orthodox we are very blessed to have these rules, rather than to have the burden of choosing our own discipline, like our Protestant brothers do. That's because, as a pregnant woman, I simply can't follow the traditional rules, and have felt that I must choose something else instead. But while discussing the dilemma with some of my Protestant friends, I have come to realise that fasting, the way it was meant to be, is not really an exercise in self-discipline so much as an obedience. And I think that is because we are less likely to feel proud of our success in giving up meat if everyone at church did too. We are all on the same journey, united in Christ and walking together to joy of His Pascha.

Since I have come to understand this, I've realised why it has been so difficult for me to choose something to fast from: my part in this obedience, as a pregnant woman, is NOT to give up meat and dairy. And while this may seem like a freebee to my fellow Orthodox travellers, the reality is that it is much harder in some ways. First, my husband is fasting, so we are not making this journey the same way. (Also, I have to cook for both of us.) And second, it is much harder to experience the joy of the feast if one has not fasted at all-- it can be very isolating.

A good analogy is that we are all on the road to Pascha and must travel in the simplest manner possible, allowing more time for prayer, reflection, and fellowship. We have to use our bodies to search for God. In others words, we have to walk. I, on the other hand, am already allowing God to use my body for the creation of life. I have to take a cab. And while that might seem like the more desirable way to travel for those whose feet are already sore after one week, the reality is that I don't get to walk with the rest of you. I have to watch you as I drive past alone in the cab--no one but me and the baby. God is driving (I think) but I'm not good at conversation.

Luckily for me, the cab stops and lets me out at all the pubs and rest stops along the road where I can meet the rest of you for communion and fellowship (ie church). But in the mean time the journey can be rather lonely, which is why I kept trying to come up with things to fast from so that I feel included.

But I think I've been looking at it all wrong really. Realistically I'm still on the same road as the rest of my fellow Orthodox, so there should be no reason to feel left out on the day we arrive at the feast--IF I am following the spirit of the fast. It is not about the things we give up, but the spirit in which we choose to avoid them that matters. We are not avoiding certain foods to punish our bodies anymore than we choose to walk in order to develop blisters. We avoid certain foods because they take time and energy to prepare and digest that is better spent in fellowship at church or in our prayer corners. We walk in order to go there together. In other words, "feasting" means fussing in the kitchen, separated from each other and distracted by the cares of the world, like Martha. Fasting is sitting at God's feet like Mary and the rest of the faithful. And I can sit at God's feet (or walk at His side, or ride in His cab), cheese or no cheese.

I have said in other posts that what I want to do, and think all of us should try to do, is fast from stress during Lent. So what I have chosen to do is keep the non-fasting items I must eat as simple as possible--adding cheese to my plate of Lenten pasta or something--the aim of my meal plans being to spend as little time in the kitchen as possible.

Of course, for most of us in the western world, we're so blessed with abundance that for us SIMPLE meals are almost always non-Lenten ones. We're not used to eating things without meat and cheese, so the fast presents us with quite a challenge sometimes. But the path is wide. Some people walk right in the middle on the hardest part of the road (I think these people follow the "no oil" rule), some people walk on the turf next to it, and a few of us give up and catch the bus.

The point is that we all go the same direction on the path that God has laid for us. And if we catch the bus occasionally and meet up with everyone else at the pub along the way, then we won't be able to stray too far.

In the meantime, my job is to rest in the car, let God control my body, let Him bring life from it, and learn to love communion with my baby and with God.

There goes the bandwagon--and my butt hurts!!

Oh I am soooo pathetic. I give up TWO things for Lent: Facebook (so far a BIG relief) and coffee (except church coffee which, come on guys, really doesn't count). Today is day four of Lent and I couldn't handle it anymore. Tea just wasn't cuttin' it. My mother takes Theo on Thursday mornings for music class and I get the morning off and the only way I was going to avoid the housework itch was if I went out and the easiest place was Starbucks. And I'm just not going to have TEA.

But on the plus side my husband works from home and since his day's work involved mostly searching for client contact details online, he could come with me and bring the lap top. We had a lovely time. He worked while I scribbled in my journal. We had a REAL conversation for a change instead of the kind you have at the end of the day when you're too tired to be articulate or else you end up arguing over nothing.

So I figured if I get quality time with my husband out of my coffee obsession then it really doesn't count as falling off the bandwagon right?

Fasting from stress.

There are two ways we can anticipate something as big and beautiful as having a baby. One is to watch the clock, count the minutes, run around frantically trying to ready the nest, pack the bags a week before the due date, go the hospital at the very first tweak of abdominal cramping-- basically be as stressed out and over-excited as possible. Or we can wait quietly, continue to enjoy life at a moderate pace, make no big plans, set no specific goals and let the baby come when it comes.

When I was pregnant with Theo I was smart enough (or lucky enough) to try the latter approach in preparation for the birth. My mom was two weeks overdue with both my sister and me and her labour took two days nearly so I considered myself as likely to be on baby death-row for at least that amount of time. (Baby death-row being perhaps not the best way of describing the feeling a pregnant woman has when she is overdue and waiting for her sentence to be carried out already.)

So when I started having contractions only a week after my due date I really wasn't sure that I was in labour at all. So I went about my business, did grocery shopping, stopped at the employment office to do my papers, had a bath, had a nap, watched a movie. It wasn't till my water broke that I figured I actually was in labour after all. And even then I expected I would be be busy with it for hours and hours so I tried to take a nap. In the end my labour lasted only five hours and I can't help thinking that my relaxed attitude contributed to the ease and briefness of my labour and delivery. (I acknowledge that I am also just genetically lucky to have had so little pain.) The result was a beautiful birth experience that left me feeling completely invigorated and overwhelmed with the kind of joy I've only ever known at Pascha.

Now that it is Lent I'm faced with the challenge of fasting and all the stress we Orthodox tend to associate with it. A friend of mine remarked that it wasn't the change in diet that was so hard for her, but having to drastically reduce the AMOUNT of food she ate. She said there was no point in trading steak and potatoes for lentil soup if you ate 4 helpings of it just to feel full. And she had a good point. What's the point of changing your diet so you can feast on perogies? The point is that we aren't feasting. However, in her mind, I think she felt that the opposite of feasting is starving-- fasting was meant to be difficult after all.

But that got me thinking about how easy it is for us as Orthodox to approach the fast as being either a different kind of feast (of the ethnic vegan food variety) or as a sort of self-punishing famine. I tend towards the latter habit and I think most convert Orthodox do too-- especially when they come from Protestant backgrounds where they had the burden of choosing their own discipline instead of simply being obedient to tradition. It is easy to think that giving up feasting means giving up things we like and thereby feeling guilty if we continue to eat something we enjoy or do something we think of as a luxury--even if they aren't a part of the traditionally restricted food items.

But I do not believe for a moment that the traditional fasting rules were designed as self- punishment, nor do I believe that God wants us all to walk around half-starved, feeling light-headed and ill. After all, our bodies are His temple and we are not meant to abuse them by walking around hungry and incapable of concentrating. (Think how dangerous it would be for truck drivers or surgeons to be Orthodox if that were the case).

So I wonder if perhaps the real purpose behind the traditional fasting rules is to require us to slow our pace of life and reduce our stress so we have more energy for church and prayer. A friend commented to me that she was planning to rest more during Lent--even though it didn't sound like a good Lenten discipline. But I think as a matter of fact she is doing what we should ALL be doing during Lent. That the traditional fasting rules make no sense at all if we aren't actively trying to rest and relax as well. Our lives are ridiculously full and overwhelmingly busy most of the time that we have no time and energy for God. We're all buzzing about like Martha, readying the feast that we are missing the better part.

Of course I'm a stay-at-home mom and I make my own hours-- mostly. But I do tend to set unrealistic goals for myself and add to my list of daily challenges by planning complicated meals that take a lot of organising. I invite people round and try to play hostess even when I'm too tired.

So for my son's second birthday I felt terribly guilty that I hadn't planned anything or made any kind of effort to host a party or a dinner because I was far too tired. But in the end we had the best kind of Orthodox party there is-- the spontaneous shin dig. We invited whoever was free to stop by and hang out for ice cream cake after church on Sunday. I didn't cook, I didn't clean, I just enjoyed the fellowship and so did Theo. He opened his presents and blew out his two candles and enjoyed the attention of all his parents' familiar church friends.

I think this is the sort of approach we should all have to fasting. To avoid not simply the feasting but all the stresses that come with preparing a feast. Cook simple meals, avoid too many extra social engagements and make more time for rest and for church, so that our minds as well as our hearts and bodies are prepared for the Great Feast.