continuing the grooming experiments. thoughts about breastfeeding and child-rearing.

i've changed the way i brush my teeth. first, i was using sea salt to swish out my mouth. but that dried out my lips really badly, and they remained dry for hours, which was annoying. plus, it sometimes made my head feel funny, and my eyes got swollen and baggy looking. it was just too much salt.

so i switched to chewing on bits of red cabbage in order to deactivate the acids in things like coffee. it turns out that chewing on leaves works really well to give the mouth a fresh feeling. however, i'm a little concerned about the goitrogenic effects of eating raw cabbage frequently. fortunately, it's only a little bit of raw cabbage. but it would be easy to find some non-goitrogenic alternative leaf. that's not really an issue.

for a while, i was brushing my teeth with the toothbrush still, rinsing it under the running water, without toothpaste, just dry scrubbing the teeth.

but i have stopped doing that, for the past couple days. this was encouraged by the fact that i read at weston price that the primitive cultures did not brush their teeth at all, and did not even do any activity that even resembled toothbrushing, and their teeth were perfectly healthy so long as they had a good diet. someone talked about vitamin c being important for healthy gums and teeth, and that if you had enough vitamin c, you resisted any harmful effects of plaque buildup. plaque could build up and it didn't do any damage if you had plenty of vitamin c.

so i am looking at my teeth, and yes, there is plaque building up. my roots are exposed because of all the orthodontic work i was forced to get when i was too young to consent or refuse, and when the internet didn't exist, and so all of us were ignorant and unquestioning about everything, because we hadn't read about the possibility of any alternatives. that's the wonderful thing about the internet: it shows us a whole world full of people, some of whom do things very differently than we do. so, i got orthodontic work, and eight total teeth removed, which includes the wisdom teeth. weston price says that maybe, just maybe, my children won't have a small, narrow jaw with maloccluded teeth, if i eat really well during conception and pregnancy and breastfeeding. well, anyway, the plaque is most obvious as it clings to the exposed tooth roots.

this is actually a somewhat dangerous experiment, because i am eating an unhealthy modern diet. i drink coffee, and i eat lots of sugar. or rather, moderate amounts, maybe not as much as some people do.

the only time i felt unusual pain was a day or two ago. i had eaten something strange. i had some skittles candy, and i had snapple orange drink. i think i had one or two other candy-like things. the tooth that hurt was the new cavity, the one that he said was almost at the point of a root canal, the canine tooth on the right. it hurt only a little bit. i am trying to notice a connection between teeth pain, and what i eat. but it will also be connected to the bruxism from exposure to, or deliberate use of, st johns wort. and i might have had that a couple days ago, so it was probably the reason. in fact i did, definitely, use it sometime this past week.

but i do feel sure of one thing. there is no reason at all to brush a baby's teeth while it's nursing. that is the most natural, animal diet that can possibly be given to a person. if there is anything in the world that our teeth were designed to withstand, it's human milk. i don't know how old a child is when it gets its first teeth, but if you breastfeed them for a long time, as i intend to do, they will have a few teeth for a little while during breastfeeding. the bonobos nurse until they are five years old. i think my policy will be 'always say yes.' there won't be a set in stone time when i suddenly start rejecting my baby just because the doctors and the calendar tell me to. just 'always say yes.' that's easy enough. but i won't be surprised or worried if the kid really DOES nurse until they're five years old or so.

the contraceptive effects of breastfeeding fade away at about six months. i intend to try to get pregnant again and then tandem breastfeed. i think this is probably unnatural and unusual, something bonobos wouldn't do - they only have one at a time, i think. but then, they aren't really meat eaters. they eat small amounts of meat occasionally. humans are probably stronger, more fertile, and more able to nourish babies because of meat eating. but i wonder what will happen to the colostrum if i give birth again while tandem breastfeeding. the nature of the milk will change. it will be newborn milk again, and the older child will get milk not designed for its age. they say that the calories increase, in milk, as the child ages. he gets more calories in the milk as he gets older. i imagine this is because toddlers are walking around, using energy, instead of being held and carried, and their muscles are developing. the 'scientists' said they were surprised to find that milk had MORE, not fewer, calories as the child got older, because they expected the breasts to try to wean the child as it was learning to eat solid food. or rather, that's my paraphrase. they expected the children wouldn't need the milk anymore because they were eating food, so it would therefore have fewer calories. but it looks like that interpretation is wrong. the milk intends to continue feeding very active children who are also eating solid food, and running around, and learning muscular coordination, and developing their brains and nervous systems.

so, if my second baby gets this milk, will it be high-calorie milk then, during the baby's inactive period of just sitting there and being carried around? will it then be too fattening for a little infant, if it's still the milk designed for an active toddler?

well, anyway. teeth don't need to be brushed when the baby is only nursing, if it has any teeth at all. since my kids will be nursed a long time, they will definitely have teeth. but they will start eating solid foods, and so if i choose the right foods, they won't have problems.

i think that emotions like 'shame' and fear are created in young infancy. i intend to prevent my children from feeling those feelings. i will raise them with acceptance of their bodies. nobody is going to be 'bad' or 'good' because they did or didn't make it to the toilet in time, for instance. they simply don't have control of those nerves and muscles. being unable to control your nerves and muscles is not 'bad.' i believe that if children are raised without shame and fear in infancy, then they become shameless and fearless for their whole lives, and don't even know how to feel those feelings. if you are forced to feel those emotions in adulthood, they don't hurt you as deeply, they don't 'push your buttons' or control you as badly. those feelings of shame and fear can only control you if they throw you back into infancy. i know about this because of the psychotronic attackers putting me into fake situations of artificial shame and fear. it's not the same as it would be if i were a child raised in an authoritarian house with punishing parents who made me feel like i was 'bad' or 'dirty.'

the one problem that i do have is fear of touch and intimacy, which DOES come from my infancy. i was like an autistic child and couldn't stand to be touched. there were reasons for that - food sensitivities, and possibly my being a week premature, and my bad reaction to mom's anaesthesia.

i think that what you do in young infancy will shape a child's whole life and all of the emotions that they feel. their physical health and the psychological environment will permanently teach them to feel a certain way, and to be unfamiliar with feelings of shame, fear, rage, helplessness, traumatic loss, and other negative emotions.

anyway, on the grooming experiments, i'm still going without shampoo. as i've said before, i originally was using shampoo to wash my whole body, which i learned when i lived with eric. it feels much nicer than soap, and it doesn't clog the pores and cause pimples. it leaves your skin feeling actually clean, instead of having a waxy buildup all over it.

well, i'm not even using that anymore. i am still taking hot baths and showers, not necessarily every day. but i now see that as something which can be done in a primitive setting, now that i know that you can heat up rocks in a fire, and then put the rocks into a small pool of water. i had imagined that it would be almost impossible to create hot water in a primitive setting, because i imagined you'd have to boil a cauldron over a fire for hours to get enough hot water. cauldrons are usually made of iron, and they'd be hard to make in a primitive, fiat-moneyless tribal setting. but the hot rocks in water technique convinces me that i'd still be able to get hot water as needed, just not as conveniently as i can here. hot water isn't as much of a scarce luxury as i thought it was. it's very useful for aches and pains, nausea, overall illness, tiredness, coldness, achy joints, menstrual cramps, etc.

my hair has gotten greasy, but it reached a plateau of greasiness, and i got used to it. it now feels about the same every day. i was already familiar with that because i had already been doing experiments of going longer between hair washings, the way people used to do in the old days. when i was a teenager, i learned to wash my hair every day. but that's because i had a perm, and i styled my hair every day with hair sprays, mousse, gel, and a blow dryer. but now that i think about it, when i was a young kid, still taking baths instead of showers, i might not have been required to shampoo my hair every single day, in every single bath. maybe i did, maybe i didn't. i don't remember. it might have been every other day. but back in the distant past, it was normal for people to go a week without washing their hair. i'm just not washing my hair with anything at all except hot water.

and i'm no longer scrubbing my scalp. originally, i believed that the more you scrubbed your scalp, the better off you were. i scrubbed it with my fingernails while washing, and i scrubbed it with the comb while combing it. i deliberately scratched the scalp for a soothing effect. it does feel good. but it triggered scale and dandruff. i don't mean that it merely loosened up the dandruff that was already there. i mean it CAUSED dandruff to develop, which had not been there previously. now that i'm no longer scrubbing, the dandruff isn't even there. it isn't merely sticking to my head and failing to get scrubbed off. there just isn't any. or rather, very little. the scrubbing and scratching supposedly made it easier for fungus to grow, or something, according to the theory. every time i would use the comb and scratch my scalp, there would be scale and gross clumps of dandruff within a day. now that i am not scrubbing it, there is almost none.

and now, i know for sure it's been at least a week, and actually, it's been longer than that, because i didn't record the exact date that i started, since this was kind of unofficial. but i no longer feel dirty or uncomfortable. i no longer feel 'icky.' if i pay attention to it, i notice that my scalp feels a sensation which is slightly unpleasant. however, i think that some of the skin problems might be from bad water quality - i think it has fungus in it. anyway, the air is cold and dry here in december, and i don't even feel sweaty or greasy on the skin over my whole body. only the head and face are greasy.

i rarely had problems with dry skin in the past. the only time i ever had dry skin was when i used antibacterial soaps, like dial. i only used it because i lived with my parents, and that's what they had bought. i don't believe in antibacterial soaps, and have always had contempt for them. when i used dial to wash my whole body in the shower, it always made my nipples in particular very dry, with peeling skin. it would happen very quickly after using dial. and it happens if i wash my hands with antibacterial soaps. so if i had ever been using that in the past, i would have noticed now that the dry skin problem had gone away. but since i didn't use any chemical soaps, my skin just feels as normal as it did before. it is neither dry nor greasy, except, as i said, on my face. my face has to be washed almost every day, or else the grease runs into my eyes, and it burns a lot. that might change eventually too.

i definitely won't give my kids fluoride. i don't think they need any fluoride at all in their entire life. fluoride treatments at the dentist seem particularly silly. they stick that awful-tasting goo into those styrofoam bite things. then you keep it on the teeth for a short time. this seems very pointless to me. the idea is that you're giving them a high concentration of fluoride, which is supposed to create new, hardened enamel then and there. but i believe that fluoride probably weakens the tooth structure, no matter how it's used, no matter how you ingest it, whether you apply it topically to the teeth, or are forced to drink it in your water supply.

the point was, even if i did have my children brushing their teeth in some way, with a plain toothbrush, or with any kind of toothpaste at all, it would be fluoride-free. if you do compromise on teethbrushing at all, fluoride STILL seems totally unnecessary and harmful, based on what i know about it now. 'animal humans' wouldn't have EVER been exposed to that chemical in the wild. primitive humans, even if they did have some method of chewing leaves or scrubbing something against the teeth, would still NEVER have had fluoride anywhere on or in their bodies. it's such an unusual chemical that you would never run across it 'in your backyard.' it has to be mined from the earth, and refined into chemical elements, using technology and manufacturing and factories and other things that people never had thousands of years ago. non-human animals don't have their teeth falling out as they get older, unless there is a problem - domestic livestock might, but wild animals don't, as far as i know. domestic livestock eat corn and other unnatural foods, which would cause them some problems. anyway, animals aren't chewing up rocks full of fluoride in order to preserve their teeth.

twice now, sue gave me an altoid mint at work. i drink coffee at work, so i would have the usual amount of coffee breath. she drinks coffee too, and smokes, and so she carries those mints around, and she found out that i like them. so it might not be abnormal for her to offer me mints. it could be within the normal range of bad breath that you'd expect from coffee. i would be curious to know if my breath was much worse than usual. i'd wonder if i have 'carnivore breath.' like rotting dead animals, or some other horrible decay smell. but that would be noticeable, and i'd smell it myself, and i don't think i have carnivore breath. i don't think that the plaque buildup smells very much. but i don't have much of it, and i don't yet know what it will be like.

i'm wondering about the 'doing chores' phenomenon that i'm reading about in some of the attachment parenting blogs.

i don't think we're going to be writing charts. maybe, maybe not. i probably wouldn't have minded chore charts so much, except that in the beginning of my psychotronic attack experiences, one of the things they forced me to do was make a chart of each day when i was supposed to take out the trash, etc.

i want the kids to contribute to the household functioning in a way that actually matters. they are not going to do stupid, trivial things like 'pick up your socks off the floor' or other petty nagging. instead, they are going to contribute economically in such a way that they are eating the food that they themselves planted and harvested and cooked. i saw a tv show where some primitive tribe had a little toddler sitting on the ground, holding a big sharp knife and cutting up food. and another kid ran right by, and the toddler moved the knife out of the way. the tv show stopped the camera on the shot where the other kid had run next to the knife, and they drew a circle around the exact location where the child's hand or whatever body part had been, to show how close it was. this tv show portrayed it as an 'oh my god!' sort of incident. with disapproval about the fact that the toddler was using a knife at such a young age. that convinced me that toddlers can and should learn how to use sharp knives. it's amusing, i was convinced of the exact opposite of what the tv show wanted me to believe. those tv shows were disapproving of the horrors of this primitive lifestyle, in a poverty-stricken community somewhere in africa or south america or somewhere. where kids are forced to use knives to cut food at such a young age, instead of having the luxury of sitting in front of a television all day watching barney the dinosaur.

the only thing that i am wondering about is what will happen during tandem breastfeeding to the constituency of my breast milk. (it's strange to say 'my' breast milk, instead of 'the' breast milk, in an abstract detached way. i don't have any arrangements in the real world that would lead to marriage or childbirth right now, especially with the poisons on my carpet, and the resin fillings in my teeth causing such breast pain. i can't imagine how i would nurse with my severe breast pain and tenderness. and i don't want to share the poisonous plastic bisphenol-a with my nursing babies or my developing fetuses either.)

another thing. i looked at that book in my google library about make-believe. i'm convinced that children do learn mental/psychological habits like that from their parents, and that they can be encouraged or discouraged to think in an open-minded way at a young age. some kids will have a temperament that leads them to be closed-minded adults anyway, but you can have a greater or lesser degree of closed-mindedness if you encourage make believe and tolerate questioning and the unexpected ideas that kids have. so even if my kids are helping grow the food in the garden, or whatever, i still want them to have fantasy lives, and i still want to 'educate' them somehow by giving them books. but i'm not sure about the books, i'm not sure what i'll do with that. books can be very confusing and can mess you up, because i've read books that were just horrible and insane, and they made me feel hopeless and confused. i remember something they said about the enneagram six: you ask yourself, which belief systems made me feel MORE secure? which belief systems made me feel LESS secure? i've encountered books that just made me feel insane and miserable. i want my kids to have books that make them feel like they can understand the universe and have sane, realistic guidelines. i want them to know how to protect their minds and their belief systems.

well, that's about all for now. i might read about tandem breastfeeding. i am concerned that the older child's high-calorie milk might be too 'heavy' for the young infant.