Chugga chugga chugga, the Black Diamond Express Train to Hell is on it’s way.

December 9 // St. Ingebert JUZ
December 10 // House Show in Bingen

If you’re interested in attending the Bingen show, it’s open to the public, but I didn’t want to post the address here. So leave me a comment with your email address, and I will send you the address. And for those of you who don’t already know, Black Diamond Express Train to Hell is the band in which I warble.

Pretty please everyone cross their fingers that my cold is gone before show time. Or at least the part of the cold that has my throat scratching and my ears feeling stuffy. Singing harmonies when you can’t hear very well is always the wrong thing to do.

In the meantime, I’m fascinated at the thought of performing while prego. I have never seen a pregnant lady on stage. Though this probably has a lot to do with the fact that pregnancy is only a nine month shebang, out of which only four or five make your condition obvious, the thought strikes me as being strange. Like, get more pregnant ladies on stage! Then again, if it fits into your schedule, why not fit in a half year break when you’re round and burly and incapable of standing for long periods of time? Makes just as much sense as business as usual. But I’m still really curious, have any of you ever seen a pregnant lady on stage? Because maybe it’s just a coincidence that I see a lot of cock rock. Also: I’m taking bets on how many times I knock the microphone over with my stomach.

Cod grant me coherent sentences to articulate these ideas to Peanut when (seems too optimistic to say “if”) she finds herself in the princess stage. Any of you dealt with it already?

I pilfered this graphic from spacebook. I would love to give its maker proper credit. But I haven’t a fucking clue who its maker is. So if you know, please fill me in so I can give credit where it’s due.

And jaysus the waists on Disney women just kill me. Blarg.

Holy stomach earthquake Batman. Peanut must be practicing her moshing. My stomach is bubbling and rolling like a witch’s cauldron. It is at times like these when I get the occasional clairvoyent moment about what it really is that is in there and what it is really going to be like to have it on the outside in less than three months.

Peanut pokes an elbow (or is it a knee? or a foot? or a forehead?) out a few inches above my belly button. I poke her back. She pokes again, but this time holds the position, temporarily giving my stomach a little chin. I poke back again, and this time she responds with a few low kicks. Does she wonder where the poking is coming from? Is this the first in a long list of things I do that will annoy her throughout her life? (I can already hear her saying “Maoo-oom” in that “you are so ridiculous lady” voice that kids specialize in.) Or is she playing along?

Last week I held a friend’s baby for a while so she could eat lunch in peace. The baby cried a lot, and then threw up on my arm. A preview of things to come. Four-month-old babies are heavy, and all this “I’m pregnant and can’t lift anything” is making me weak. Is there any muscle left in my arms? Certainly doesn’t feel like it. Sheesh. Maybe I should start training with hand weights now. Good thing they are irresistable. The babies that is, not the hand weights.

I spend most of my days intensely conscious of how much will change in a few months and enjoying every second that I spend on a spontaneous outing or alone with the Beard or just quietly reading a book all the more with the knowledge that very soon none of those things are going to be possible without planning. I want to document everything so that I remember how it all felt when I’m not pregnant anymore and all of this starts to seem like some sort of hazy dream.

Blogger mamas are always talking about how grooming routines fall to the wayside when you have a baby. There’s no time to shower or brush your hair or put on make up, they report, sadly. Every time I read another one of their “and you won’t shower for WEEKS” horror stories, I think, hey, at least I’m ahead of the curve on that one. I only shower every two weeks or so anyway, and it shouldn’t be a problem to find someone to hold the baby for a half hour that irregularly. I also don’t wear make up, and I haven’t brushed my hair in at least two years. (This, contrary to popular belief, doesn’t even result in nest head. Though I do have a few volunteer dreads in the back.) I wonder how, if Peanut turns out to be one of those kids who hates having her hair brushed, this is going to work against me later. Another bridge to cross when we come to it.

This seems to be the awesome part of the pregnancy—the title “27 weeks” refers to the week I took that picture, though this week marks 29—the part where I feel pretty good. I wouldn’t go so far as to say “best I’ve ever felt in my life” as walking a lot hurts, my legs and back ache occasionally from all the extra weight, and I get really intense heart burn when I eat the wrong things (goodbye raw onions, sniff sniff, miss you). But in comparison with the three-plus-month stretch of puking, full-body poison ivy would feel alright. And now I’m round enough that people on the bus give me their seats sometimes. People are really nice to you when you’re pregnant. Though the downside is that you really, really need them to be nice to you because otherwise you’d be fucked. Less than three months to go, and I’m already looking forward to being able to lay on my stomach and walk like I’m not half-crippled again. But until then I’ll enjoy the cauldron stomach and the kindness and hope I actually manage to get a number of writing projects finished before February.

Every winter I write about Dragon Slayers. And every winter they keep me from getting sick at least a couple of times (or help me get better asap). When it comes to curing and preventing colds, you could take vitamin C in a tablet made of who knows what from who knows where, or you could take advantage of the magical healing powers of lemon juice, garlic, and chili powder. I promise that it doesn’t taste as gross as it probably sounds.

You can read last year’s post about Dragon Slayers here. Or you can just check out the recipe below, and tell me all about your own diy home remedies in the comments—I’m always looking to expand my arsenal. Here’s to not getting sick this winter.

The Dragon Slayer

Ingredients:
1/2 fresh lemon
1 medium-sized clove garlic, minced
a dash of chili powder

Method:
Squeeze out the lemon and place juice in a small cup. Sprinkle in minced garlic and top with chili powder. Down in one go and marvel at the force of nature that is vitamin c mixed with garlic and sweet, sweet (spicey) chili.

This post was featured on Wildcrafting Wednesday on Mind, Body, and Sole.

There is really only one thing that is certain when it comes to good parenting, one thing that I think applies to everybody no matter who you are or what you believe or where you live: parenting requires flexibility. There are no rules and there is no One True Way. There is you and there is your baby and there are hundreds of angles to approaching the hundreds of unique situations and trials that you are going to find yourself facing. So of course it follows that the most important thing you can do to prepare yourself for the hatching of your own kidlet is to keep an open mind.

When friends or family respond to a parenting tactic that I’m into trying with criticism and/or with horror stories about that tactic failing for someone else, I tend to respond with something like a shrug. “Maybe it’ll work for us, and maybe it won’t,” I usually say. “But it’s where we’d like to start trying.” No use in making some sort of master plan, especially considering the fact that we haven’t even met the main player yet.

But knowing that I don’t need a master plan hasn’t stopped me from inhaling books about birthing and parenting and baby development. I bought My Mother Wears Combat Boots at an anarchist festival in Holland where we performed with Black Diamond before I knew for sure that I was pregnant. When we got back to Mainz, I took a pregnancy test—positive— and started reading right after I finished doing cartwheels at how quickly Peanut had decided to show up. I like to read, and—particularly during the part of being pregnant where I was spending all my time throwing up/laying in bed—I have a lot of time to read right now. When it turns out that Peanut is difficult on one or the other topics, I want to already have an arsenal of Things to Try Out in my head. As I don’t have a lot of parents in my group of friends, books were the first place I turned for stories from the front line.

This is a list of (almost) all of the books that I read during my pregnancy. They were all recommended to me by other gorilla parents, who I immediately began plying with questions about reading material that they had found helpful after finding out about Peanut. I’ve compiled a list (chronologically in the order I read them) and written mini-reviews for each of them so that some of you other gorilla-parent-readers can figure out where you want to start. And I’ve included my amazon links, in case you were planning on buying one of them anyway and wanted to help me earn another forty cents. Otherwise, off to the library with you! And off to the comments section with those of you who have any other books to recommend…

My Mother Wears Combat Boots // Jessica Mills

A great punk-rock-mom book. Starts with a month-by-month of pregnancy (half anecdote, half science), then talks anecdotally about a variety of topics you won’t find in many other tomes: touring with your band while pregnant and touring with children, planning childcare for demonstrations, and organizing child care co-ops, to name just a few. I really enjoyed how personal it was and how relevant the topics are for folks involved in any sort of punk/diy culture. You won’t find any advice about touring with infants in What to Expect, that’s for damn sure.

What to Expect When You’re Expecting // Heidi Murkoff , Sharon Mazel , Sharon Mazel and others

This book is supposed to be a classic, but I don’t think I would have bought it if it hadn’t shown up in a used book store downtown for 1 euro at just the right moment. I’ve found all of the information about what you can expect to happen to your body during each month of pregnancy useful, and I always felt instantly better about any new prego-mat symptoms for being able to quickly look them up and hear that they were normal. (When your hands suddenly start going numb all the time, you sometimes need someone to tell you that it doesn’t mean the baby is dead or you are about to be. It’s a good book for keeping hypochondriacal tendencies at bay, though for the serious hypochondriac it might have too many suggestions.)

BUT—and it’s a big but—I’ve found a lot of other things about the book offensive. It is written completely within the husband/wife paradigm, with nary a mention of the fact that some expecting mothers are single, some are partnered with women, some aren’t married, etc, etc. Fuck that. And fuck the section at the end about what your husband can do if he’s feeling jealous that the baby gets to spend so much time with “his boobs” once you’re breastfeeding. Seriously? So if you’re heterosexual, married, and think that a romantic relationship makes you the owner of someone else’s body, this book is for you. If you’re not, I’d probably just skip it—though if a copy falls into your lap, it can be useful if read with blinders.

The Essential Hip Mama: Writing From the Cutting Edge of Parenting // editor, Ariel Gore

I was expecting to love this book, and I didn’t. Hip Mama was a radical parenting zine for years and years (not sure if they’re still going, they have a kind of confusing web presence), so I was excited about reading a collection of punk rock mom stories ala My Mother Wears Combat Boots. But the content turned out to be a lot more abstract, a lot more “what does it mean to be a radical/’hip’/offbeat parent” then “this is how I dealt with Disney female stereotypes in parenting my daughter.” I keep telling myself that it might just be the kind of book I’ll enjoy more in a couple of years. (I think I would have preferred Hip Mama Survival Guide by the same. Anyone read it?)

Wise Woman’s Herbal for the Childbearing Year // Susan Weed

I LOVE THIS BOOK. Susan Weed is a pretty well-known herbalist, but this was the first of her books that I have read. It is full of herbal remedies for various pregnancy complaints, as well as herbal suggestions to help prepare your body for birth, help with starting labor, and taking care of yourself and your baby postpartum. Awesome. Ten stars. A plus. Seventy cheers.

The Birth Partner // Penny Simkin

At least ten different people recommended this book to me. And, though I haven’t quite made it to the end yet, I’d already recommend it to someone else. Great, straight-forward, easy-to-read guide to what happens (or could happen, in the case of a problem) during birth as well as how to be a good birthing partner. The line drawings of women being aided during labor made me cry the first time I saw them, and I’m planning on reading the whole thing again before Peanut’s debut in February.

Spiritual Midwifery // Ina May Gaskin

Ina May Gaskin was (is?) a midwife on the Farm, a rather famous Tennessee commune still in existence today. The caravan of folks who became the community’s first residents started delivering their own children while they were still on the road to their new home. Their positive, realistic, and woman-friendly approach to asssiting birth is not only beautiful, it has the caesarean rate among Farm births at 1.4 percent from a national average of 24.4 percent in the same year. Even their use of delivery instruments such as forceps is notably low (in comparison to hospital rates). All that is to say that this is a book written by a woman who knows from experience that birth can be an incredibly positive experience that can be safely assisted at home.

The majority of the book is made up of birth stories written by women who gave birth on the Farm. Part of Ina May’s goal in this book and in her birthing philosophy is to create a positive mythos surrounding birth to replace the aura of fear that is so often perpetuated. If you are afraid of giving birth, then this book might just make you feel better, make you believe that, yeah, birth can be a positive thing, intense though it might be. The end of the book is written for aspiring midwives, and covers a lot of details about pelvic sizes and baby positions that I skimmed, but which is probably very helpful to those more interested in science then anecdote.

Criticism: the phrases “it was heavy” and “it was psychedelic” are used a lot to describe giving birth—and those phrases simply don’t mean anything to me, besides sounding a little silly when used over and over again over hundreds of pages. I am not afraid of birth, and frankly, I wanted more gore. Not gore for gore’s sake, but gore for the sake of having a realistic picture of what I’m going to be going through during labor, of having some sort of concrete idea of what being in labor means. If you were to take all of these stories literally (and hadn’t read anything else) you might come away with the impression that giving birth is a lot like taking LSD. But criticism aside, I loved reading these stories, and I think the book is a total success in describing birth in a positive, woman-friendly way. I would recommend it to friends, though I preferred Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth (see review below).

The Continuum Concept // Jean Liedhoff

This book was recommended to me by every anarchist parent who I asked for pregnancy reading suggestions and then some, and it is more of an anthropology book then a parenting book per say. In it Liedhoff shares her observations regarding child care from years spent living among several groups of Indians in South America. It is a compelling argument for attachment parenting, a fascinating study, and, I might add, a damn good argument in the anti-civ direction. Though based purely on observation and not on “science,” what she has to say just feels instinctively right and I have since read multiple books choc full of science that make exactly the same claims that she does (for example that baby wearing is good for your baby and that babies being included in all parts of life—though not in a way that makes them life’s exclusive focus—is good for your baby). Only problem I had with it was that at one point she attempts to “blame” homosexuality on bad parenting, which makes it sound like she thinks homosexuality is a negative result of a negative practice. Minus ten points for you Jane Liedhoff. Otherwise a really thought-provoking read.

Unconditional Parenting: Moving From Rewards and Punishment to Love and Reason // Alfie Kohn

This was the perfect book to read directly after finishing The Continuum Concept, as very similar attachment parenting principles are discussed, but this time with a heap of really well-researched evidence to support their use. It starts with a compelling point, one that felt so obvious once I read it but that had never occurred to me: most modern parenting tactics are based around the idea of raising an obedient child. (For example, usually when someone says a kid is “good” they are referring to a kid who does what it is told or is quiet.) Yet when you ask parents what traits they would like to pass down to their children, “obedient” is almost never among them. In Unconditional Parenting Kohn examines a lot of our current assumptions about good parenting and makes suggestions to help parents move from, as he puts it in the title, “rewards and punishments to love and reason.” Fascinating, thought-provoking (and occasionally even practical) read.

Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth // Ina May Gaskin

This book is, for me, the quintessential Ina May book. It has all of the positive sides of Spiritual Midwifery, with none of the annoying language that I mention in my review above. By and large, like Spiritual Midwifery, it is a book of at-home birth anecdotes, with a shorter concluding section about various complications that can occur.

So. Those are the books I’ve devoured so far. Almost. I also read Real Food for Mother and Baby by Nina Planck (which I already covered extensively here), The Family Bed (interesting, but not interesting or well-written enough to review in full), and I’m currently in the middle of The Baby Book by William Sears and Marth Sears and The Bilingual Family by Edith Harding Esch and Philip Riley. On the to-read list remain: Rad Dad: Dispatches From the Frontiers of Fatherhood by Tomas Moniz and Jeremy Adam Smith; The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding by Diane Wiessinger, Diana West, and Teresa Pitman; and Infant Potty Training: A Gentle and Primeval Method Adapted to Modern Living by Laurie Boucke.

What did you read during your pregnancy? (And what did you wish you had read?) I’m always looking for another good read, so leave me some titles in the comments.

I still can’t quite believe that I can actually say it, but Wagenplatz dominos is over. Fine. We’ve moved them all, and our sleeping Wagen now sits in a much, much quieter spot far, far away from the loud, loud Haus Mainusch.

First we had to move the Wagen I have started referring to as the Opfer Box. I refer to it as the Opfer Box because the word “Opfer” is painted across the front of it in two-meter-high red letters. For those of you who don’t speak German, “Opfer” means victim, and those of you who have ever been on the business end of a really bad break up can use your imaginations as to who painted it there and why. (I like to write about the positive sides of our community so maybe you’ve gotten the idea that we’re all a bunch of peaceful hippies who hold hands and sing kumbaya together every night, but as will happen in any community of a lot of people, there is the occasional drama. I just prefer not to bother much with that side. You can read about drama anywhere, and I’m not going to turn Click Clack Gorilla into a tabloid.)

I missed the beginning of this move, so I didn’t get any good before and after photos. But I did get one photo of the Wagen leaving the spot that our sleeping Wagen now occupies.

Then, while I was off gallivanting around Tilburg, Holland (if by gallivanting you understand “cooking for 24 hours straight and then relaxing on a really amazing carpet”), the Beard and Co. moved our sleeping Wagen. I was kind of nervous to come home and have everything changed. Something about not getting to be there for the move made me twitchy. But when I came home everything was just as I’d imagined it, and now concerts in the house don’t sound like they are taking place in bed with us.

This is the new spot before we sidled into it:

And here we are, tucked in for the forseeable future (though this picture is taken from a different angle than the “before” picture, in case you were feeling confused):

Goodbye old spot. You were pretty, but I think I can with good conscience say: good riddance.

Want to read more about moving tiny houses? Check out these posts:

the wagon moves (wherein we haul my trailer home for the first time)
wagenplatz dominos part three: moving the ship
wagon dominos part two: moving my tiny house
wagenplatz dominos part one