We're back from the store and everyone is happy and content. Still hoping it'll be an early night for both kids, though. The way it's worked out this summer is that Accalia has three days where her activities begin by 9:30 a.m. or 10 a.m., and it's not especially fun for any of us that we can't just have leisurely mornings. Thankfully it's not something that we have to do every day or even beyond the summer. I seem to be becoming more and more of a night person. I don't go to bed particularly late (some nights between 11 and midnight) or sleep in (usually up by 7:30), but I've found that I prefer to do things at night if I'm not too exhausted. That started when Cole was a baby, I think, and I had nights where he wasn't in the mood to go to sleep particularly early and definitely wouldn't fall asleep if we were sitting down and nursing. He had to be moving in the sling, so I had to come up with things to do to keep me from going bonkers walking back and forth, back and forth. We'll see what the newest little one is like.

A few years ago the La Leche League Area I live in (Minnesota and the Dakotas) started providing $50 worth of continuing education to each Leader. I've usually put it toward reference books or conference attendance. This year I put it toward printed resources for myself. I ordered (from the LLL catalogue) Whole Foods For The Whole Family, Whole Foods From The Whole World (both cookbooks - the first I already have for the Group library) as well as Sheila Humphrey's The Nursing Mother's Herbal.Sheila has been a Leader in my Area for years, and I'm so pleased to finally have a copy of her book for myself.

Speaking of books, I can't recommend Ina May Gaskin's Ina May's Guide To Childbirth highly enough. Reading her first book, Spiritual Midwifery, during my pregnancy with Cole was so inspiring. This is just the same, only better.

Before the section of birth stories, Ina May writes about how the trend in the United States seems to be to share scary and gory birth stories with pregnant women, leaving many women thinking that birth could never be a positive experience. I love what she writes here:

"Now that birth has become a favorite subject of television dramas and situation comedies, this trend has been even more pronounced. No one has explained the situation more succinctly than Stephen King in his novella 'The Breathing Method.' Commenting on the fear many women have of birth, his fictional character observes, 'Believe me: if you are told that some experience is going to hurt, it will hurt. Most pain is in the mind, and when a woman absorbs the idea that the act of giving birth is excruciatingly painful-when she gets this information from her mother, her sisters, her married friends, and her physician-that woman has been mentally prepared to feel great agony.' King, you may not know, is the father of several children born at home."

That's so true. Of course childbirth will usually involve some amount of pain, but when you go into it knowing that your body is designed to give birth and isn't lacking, it's a completely different experience than being told you need x, y and z to give birth. I found out that difference with Accalia and Cole's births.