top 10 things I am doing differently this time around...

As many of you know, my husband and I did a four month detox before getting pregnant with our son, almost four years ago! Something must have worked because we got pregnant right away :-) It's time to start preparing for #2, so we are gearing up for another detox. This time it's going to be SIX LONG MONTHS of no caffeine, no alcohol, no dairy, no wheat, etc etc. Why the longer detox? The theory we used for the first one is that

it takes roughly four months for eggs and sperm to "mature" before conception,

so you want your body to be in peak condition during those four months.

The fatal flaw in our plan was that we STARTED the detox four months before conception, but that doesn't mean we were detoxed for four months... it takes a while... in fact, we can never be truly detoxed in modern society... even Indigenous Peoples living in the Arctic have a body burden of PCBs, VOCs, and other POPs (Persistent Organic Pollutants - the wrong kind of organic), that are in our air and water and fish that no one can avoid unless we move to another planet, in which case we will receive a mega dose of cosmic radiation. (Another thing I am doing differently this time is that I am not going to fly while pregnant).

So the problem is that doing a four month detox is not enough, because you spend the first few weeks/months being MORE TOXIC than usual, as your body flushes everything from your system... so you need a buffer period to get out as many of the toxins as you can so that you can have four months of being as clean as possible.

So, off the top of my head (but with years of thought and research put into it), these are the things that we are doing differently in the lead up to making baby #2:

1. I will start detoxing six months before conception instead of four.
2. I will not fly on an airplane for six months before conception (or during pregnancy - I flew from Australia to America, across America four times and then back to Australia while I was pregnant with #1- that's a lot of cosmic radiation!)
3. I have had my mercury amalgam fillings removed well before starting the detox for #2 (I had two such toxic fillings during #1's conception and pregnancy).
4. I am not going to drive in a new car during my detox or pregnancy (we bought a new car just before #1 was born, so he spent his first few years inhaling a cocktail of VOCs and other nasty off-gassings).
5. I'm not working in a job that stresses me out, or with people that stress me out. Stress hormones are not good for babies (or mothers-to-be).
6. I'm getting bioresonance therapy with a Bicom2000 machine from the lovely Michele at Recharge Life in Melbourne. Bioresonance therapy is one of the few modalities that can help eliminate allergies and food intolerances.
7. I'm cutting way down on the naturally-occurring food chemicals in my diet, such as amines and salicylates, that I now know I am sensitive to.
8. I'm going to get a filter for my shower and bath so that I am not inhaling and absorbing so much chlorine when I bathe... if anyone can recommend some good filters then please leave a comment!
9. I'm not going to get any ultrasounds/sonograms during my pregnancy. I know I can have a healthy baby, I don't care if it's a boy or a girl (see previous post) and if it's twins the midwives will be able to tell soon enough.
10. I'm going to spend more time in the sun. Baby and me need our vitamin D!

is it possible to choose the sex of your baby?

According to Dr Landrum Shettles and David Rorvik, the authors of How to Choose the Sex of Your Baby: Fully revised and updated you can give yourself a 75-80% chance of having a girl, and a 80-90% chance of having a boy. We must have been unwittingly using the "boy method" when we first got pregnant. I don't actually know, since I've only read the first 12 pages of the book. I borrowed it from a friend (who was trying to have a boy... she tried for a year without getting pregnant, then gave up and got pregnant right away with another girl). I'm not really going to enter into the whole ethical debate about whether or not it's a good thing for people to be able to choose the sex of their babies. I think the short answer is that it's probably good/bad/indifferent depending on the situation. In our situation we're pretty sure we only want to have two kids. We already have a boy, we'd be thrilled to have another healthy baby no matter what the gender (I know everyone says that, but we really mean it ), but I'm kinda intrigued by the idea of trying out this method, and since we already know we can make boys, we're going to try to make a girl. The only comment I'll make on the ethics of sex selection is to quote from the first chapter of the book to say that the late, great anthropologist '

Dr Margaret Mead "strongly favored the use of sex selection because, she argued, 'for the first time in human history, girls would be as wanted as boys.'

What she meant was that if a girl was the product of sex selection she could grow up secure in the knowledge that she had truly been wanted and was not simply the child her parents had 'settled for' when they failed to have a son."

So we'll give it a go, but only because we'll be trying for a girl... apparently trying for a boy involves the man having two strong cups of coffee just before having sex, and that won't really go well with our preconception detox...

I have to post this to claim my blog on Technorati

All I wanted to do was leave a comment on my friend Rebecca's Blog. But she uses coComment, so I thought I'd better sign up for that. Then they asked if I have a twitter account, which I do, but barely use it, so I had to remember my password for that. Then coComment said I had to join Technorati to "claim my blog"... so I did that, but then they didn't recognize my blog, so I had to do this silly post linking to my Technorati Profile.

Sometimes the internet drives me mad. I'm already a little bit ADD, so I get distracted very very easily... I wasn't even coming online to check Rebecca's blog, or comment on it, I was supposed to my posting on my own blog, which I have in the end, but not on the topic I meant to (which was, by the way, going to be titled "I have to stop performing such scientifically useless experiments" or something like that... it had to do with having my mercury fillings removed and detoxing etc, but it will have to wait for another day!).

While I'm doing this ridiculous post, I might as well shamelessly plug my latest newsletter.