In No Need Of Pretense January 6, 2010

With people you love absolutely, there really isn’t any need for make-up. they see how beautiful you are anyway, they know your flaws, they know the real you, they know the scars and the cheek-bones, they know your nice qualities and they know when you can be a real asshole! They can see through the camouflage and the pretense and the blue lenses that make you look so good and they will always love you unconditionally.

I guess we always know this subconsciously. It all came to me when I was perusing through photographs of a very fashionable friend who won’t ever be seen without make up and perfect hair – at a grocery~! I saw her pictures with her family. She was plain, simple, sans make up and all the pretenses. She was looking beautiful and this time it was the beauty deeper than her skin, conveyed through the joy her eyes – the joy of always being surrounded by people she loved and those who loved her in return!

Cheers to the new year!

Hope? December 14, 2009

Might I say how beautiful the weather is? And that it has been raining for two whole days and its so romantic?

But this is the last thing on my mind.

I have a question I need an answer to, but she who can answer it, is a person who mutely accepts.

What will happen if  someone I deeply care for will be hurt? Will it not be in vain, if I protest and say that I want to protect that person – but risk the chance of being brutally scarred myself – especially since my pleas will fall on deaf years? And my heart will bleed forever?

Empower Girls To Be Strong From the Inside Out October 8, 2009

By Patrick Sandora on August 3, 2009 10:58 AM

I don’t know about you, but I’m suffering from a bad case of only what I can call “Shudder Syndrome”, and it seems to be worsening. It’s a relatively new ailment, but it always materializes when I read those disturbing statistics about young girls. I’m sure you know the ones about anorexia, depression, cutting, date rape, binge drinking, aggression, and bulimia. The list goes on and on. The minute I hear one, my ailment flares up: it always starts with a bad feeling deep down, and then my whole body just shudders. There has to be other parents like me who are shaking with worry. And I’m the mom of three boys! I can only imagine your symptoms if you’re raising daughters. This is scary stuff.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not implying that our girls are doomed. And certainly boys have their own share of problems as well. I’m just saying we need to keep a closer eye on those trends and realize leading experts are concerned about the young female gender (and with quite valid reasons). We are seeing a rise in depression, eating disorders and low self-esteem. Most experts agree that it’s due to continual negative messages that happiness comes from the outside (being a particular dress size, wearing designer labels, or getting liposuction or breast implants (I kid you not. The increase of plastic surgery among young women is frightening!) Robbed is that great notion that real happiness comes from the inside. 

So how do we counter those constant negative media continually bombard our girls? How do we help young girls realize that there are other ways to be happy than by being rich, famous, or pencil-thin? What are ways for parents to help their daughters learn to feel comfortable in their own skin without having to copy “the look” of this week’s Hollywood idol? And just how do we turn these troubling trends around and help our girls grow to be strong, confident and happy?

Here are the four strategies:

1. Be a confident mom. Girls don’t learn to love themselves by hearing our self-esteem dinner lecture, but by having confident role models to copy. Sounds so obvious, but how easily that child development tenet is overlooked. And there’s proof: A famous University of California at Davis study found that a mother’s working status, occupation, income, education, religious affiliation, and even IQ were no where as significant on her child’s self-esteem as the mother’s own confidence level. 

Your self-perceptions–whether high or low–do trickle down to your child. So take care of yourself so your daughter can learn to love herself just as she is. Ask yourself one question each night: “If my daughter had only my behavior to watch today what would she have caught?” Was it independence or dependence? Confidence or insecurity? Be mindful of your influence. Model what you want your daughter to become. You do matter.

2. Stay connected to your daughter. I know those preteen and teen years can be tough on a parent’s ego, but a big mistake is stepping back from our daughter’s lives. Don’t! One of the most comforting finding (that didn’t make me shutter) was a survey conducted by the Girl Scouts of America survey. (Gotta love the Girl Scouts). Read this carefully: Ninety one percent of over 2000 girls surveyed aged eight to nine go to their mothers for advice.

The Early Days

Find ways to stay connected and get into her life. Granted, it may take a bit of creativity, but think! If your daughter is leaning more towards her peers, why not get a few of her friend’s mothers on board? Start a mother-daughter book club or go to yoga or exercise as a group. Watch Friends or Mean Girl with her. Read and discuss Harry Potter because she loves it. Or do what one mom told me she did: read Teen People so you can get into her zone. 

3. Foster her strengths and passions. Find that spark in your daughter and help nurture her passions, capabilities, and interests. Yoga, horseback riding, drawing, basketball, writing, cooking: what turns your daughter on? Always tailor your parenting towards her natural nature so she has permission to be herself. Let her know you love her for who she really is–not for what you hope she will become. Doing so is one of the best ways to nurture strong identity and self-worth.

The Epitome of a Positive Female Role Model

4. Find positive, female role models. Let’s offer our daughters female role models who feel comfortable in their own skin (and don’t need to rely on Botox, breast implants, dieting, and designer labels to feel attractive). What about J.K. Rowling, Erin Brockovich, Michelle Wei, Anne Hathaway, Great Aunt Harriet or even the neighbor lady next door? Expose your daughter to authentic, confident women, and then tell her why you admire them. Our girls need strong, resourceful female examples to emulate. Enough of Paris, Lindsay and Britney! 

Our best hope is to help daughters learn as early as possible that real happiness isn’t borrowed or copied, but lies within. That’s exactly why we need to help our girls become strong from the inside out. Doing so is what will help our daughters feel comfortable in their own skin. It’s also the best cure for not only my shutter syndrome (and I’m sure yours), but for those troubling trends plaguing today’s American young girls. 

You can start by boosting your influence with your daughter and stay more connected in her life. It’s the best way to counter those negative media messages and help her become her own person and enjoy who she is.

On Mirrors, Photographs, Moms and Miracles September 29, 2009

Most women, NO. Almost all women enjoy looking at themselves in a mirror especially, when they are damn beautiful.

And women find taking pictures of themselves irresistible.

They also love looking at themselves in the pictures

UNTIL

Baby arrives.

It’s funny how these women don’t care if they are wearing glasses and oily hair and look at their child in the mirror. It’s funny how these women charge their cameras and empty their memory cards to fill them again with 800 pictures of their child.

But then the word CHILD itself resonates of miracles, innocence, peace, love, need, and a purity too hard to resist. And when a woman finds herself enveloped in a sea of these emotions, she realizes she is and will always be A MOTHER.

A friend just put up 44 photos of her daughter on Facebook. All in the same place, in the same dress. And I know I became that woman too. Ah, there goes modesty.

Be Oblivious, Most People Are, When They Jog Too! September 29, 2009

I went for my regular jog, today, as a part of my post partum weight loss plan. Then I found myself getting conscious about my fat and didn’t do the jog because when fat people jog or run they shake and the world shakes with them. With every time I passed someone I thought, “will this person be laughing at me?” That got me to wondering what goes on in the minds of my fellow fitness freaks as they walk and jog their fat away. Then somewhere in the tunes, I got lost in trains of thought about -

My favorite type of music is Rock. Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park, Aerosmith, Bon Jovi, Bryan Adams. Just then I realized “The Only Thing That Looks Good On Me”; “Take A Look Around”; “Bad Medicine”; “Don’t Speak”; Represent Cuba (by Orishas) – are some of my favorite favorite songs and certainly mood uplifting. And that my Favorite Pass time is thinking about my labor and the first time I held my baby and the first time I fed her and how it felt and the tiny little thing that she was and how much she has matured in the past 6 months. Oh in the past 6 months, I found that post partum weight loss WAS INDEED not a myth contrary to what the ‘old fat ladies’ said (They once told me I’d be fat after pregnancy and it’d remain. HELLO! I’ve lost 19 pounds already. Do I hear you muffle your “I told you so?”)  Then I thought of good dance moves to this Orishas song, one of those songs that makes me feel 16! And then I thought of me in my previous slim body and that brought to mind my Zahra dancing and smiling.

I realized I was smiling.

Again I was blessed with a Happy Realization. If I was lost in my thought, maybe others are too. And there are other fat women and men trying to work it off.. And may be some were, but not every one was LOL’ing at me!

Welcoming myself to this new world of oblivion.

Why Do Babies Hiccup? September 26, 2009

My baby hiccups after every feed. And it is pretty uncomfortable for her. Hubby and I kept wondering why this happens and then one time he suggested it could be because she isn’t getting enough water.

Concerned, I looked it up on the net. Yes, water does play a part, but in easing the hiccups.

For an explanation go here:

Hiccups After Feeding

Diane Sacks

Why nursing babies get hiccups is easily explained: We burp babies to help them with air they swallow during feeding. Swallowed air causes hiccups if the air irritates the diaphragm or the nerve to the diaphragm. Babies who gulp tend to swallow more air and probably need more frequent burping before they get air trapped under the diaphragm.

What to do about the hiccups is a little trickier. They do disappear on their own, but if they persist, a few sucks of water from a spoon tip may help alleviate them. Some say the trick is to try feeding when your baby is calm and not extremely hungry. However, since most babies get excited by feeding and are almost always extremely hungry, especially in the evening, this isn’t the easiest thing to do.

Paediatrician Diane Sacks spent 20 years at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, and is currently on staff at North York General Hospital.

October 2002

Hiccups After Feeding - Diane Sacks

Why nursing babies get hiccups is easily explained: We burp babies to help them with air they swallow during feeding. Swallowed air causes hiccups if the air irritates the diaphragm or the nerve to the diaphragm. Babies who gulp tend to swallow more air and probably need more frequent burping before they get air trapped under the diaphragm.

What to do about the hiccups is a little trickier. They do disappear on their own, but if they persist, a few sucks of water from a spoon tip may help alleviate them. Some say the trick is to try feeding when your baby is calm and not extremely hungry. However, since most babies get excited by feeding and are almost always extremely hungry, especially in the evening, this isn’t the easiest thing to do.

Paediatrician Diane Sacks spent 20 years at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, and is currently on staff at North York General Hospital.

October 2002

Updates. September 10, 2009

On the darker side of my life, I’m yet not free from a nightmare. And I’m afraid it shall last with me as long as I live. Meanwhile, I will continue to verbally emote.

On the brighter side of my beautiful life, I’m learning patience. Something I wasn’t born with. I get my lessons at 4 am., at my meal times, at her feeding time, at our playing time, my computer time, my cooking time… and my husband has fun watch me learn. Everyone is having fun just by the idea that I’m learning patience. Mom says, “Now you know!!! And just so you know more… she is exactly like you.” Every now and then I get a, “Enjoyed getting attention all the time? Now enjoy giving it.” (Barbie hogs attention all day long and until she sleeps at night. Thank God, she figured out ‘night’ means sleeping 8 hours.)

Yet on the brighter side of my life, I’m looking forward to winter in UAE and enjoying motherhood and being a wife after having become a mother. Some may wonder what the difference is, but many things do change after a child enters coupledom. I’m enjoying online computer games like Farmville and Mob Wars watching Sex and the City (got all 6 seasons). I’m back to blogging, which feels awesome. And yeah, I’m losing weight….

Size 14 is over with, now, I’m a size 12!!!

P.S.: Every rose has a thorn.

Beautiful Poem of Bereavement For My Dadi August 31, 2009

I lost my Dadi last year on the 5th of September, which was also the 6th of Ramadan according to the Islamic Hijri Calendar.

I still dream of her.

I still like to pretend she didn’t ever exist.

And I’d rather never ever talk of her.

Or write. But this is the only dignified way I can grieve.

Recently, I’ve been addicted to Desperate Housewives. Finished watching Season 4 and now onto Season 5. The poem Mrs. McClusky recites for Aida, before they sprinkle the latter’s ashes, touched my heart.

Upon reading the master piece over and over, I felt it fits this old woman who was always vibrant and alive and who left us forever.

Dadi, this is for you.

“Do not stand at my grave and weep

I am not there; I do not sleep.

I am a thousand winds that blow,

I am the diamond glints on snow,

I am the sun on ripened grain,

I am the gentle autumn rain.

When you awaken in the morning’s hush

I am the swift uplifting rush

Of quiet birds in circled flight.

I am the soft stars that shine at night.

Do not stand at my grave and cry,

I am not there; I did not die.”

Mary Elizabeth Frye – 1932

Then And Now August 19, 2009

Then, I never could imagine myself as a mom for miscelleanous valid reasons.

Now, I hold my baby in my arms for hours without ever feeling I’ve done it enough.

Then, I just thought I knew what mad mad obsessive compulsive love was.

Now, post-birth, for my baby and husband, I feel a mad sort of obsessive posessive love that causes a warm heartache 24×7. Now, there is this river of love flowing constantly through me. It is in my hands, in the chores they perform all day. It is in my body, which tirelessly cushions my baby everytime she needs to be held. It is in words and food and my fears and the tiny things which make each day worthwhile.

Then, I thought I’d lose me.

Now, I know I’ve found me.

Labor, Preparing For it! August 5, 2009

LOL

I’m totally guffawing.

7 Ways To Prepare For Labor.

LOL.

Trust me. No matter how much your doctor, mother, husband, sister, nurse, doula, grandmom, granddad and everyone who’s been through labor try to prepare you. You will never be prepared for it!

This is how I describe Labor pain, I don’t know how many may or may not agree. Its cold, electric pain that shoots through you like a knife : when it starts. It subsides so slow as if a knife were being slowly pulled out of you.

This is what the doctors don’t tell.

This is why I ended up hating Eve during labor.

The only women who can use the advice from here are those who’ve had a kid before. And are awaiting the second or third or fourth one.

Oh, there’s another link that I’d love to share.

How To Breastfeed: Encouraging Little One To Latch On Properly

It’s a lovely Article.