i had a dream last night
i dreamt that i was shopping in a kind of homewares megastore in a depressingly electric slightly futuristic world and the shop was full of addicted shoppers but i didn't like it and i was just starting to think about its name - the human void - when i woke up.

all is not on the skeletal/dental front though. We were having a health week at our department with free bone density testing so after i'd lost some tooth i headed over to my appointment. The tester looked at my answers to her questions and after i'd pointed out that she'd missed that i'd had a child in the past 2 years and she'd found out that i was still breastfeeding, she confidently assured me, from my reply that i have one serve of dairy a day, that i wasn't getting enough calcium. So we did the ultrasound and I had an excellent reading. heh heh. i told her that i eat alot of tahini. What i've actually been doing throughout my breastfeeding regime is eating tahini poured onto sheep's milk yogurt. Plus i eat a normal amount of green veges and i suspect that a lot of people don't even eat what i would consider to be a normal amount. The woman i sit next to at work commented, much to my internal horror, that she doesn't eat leafy green vegetables! Her skin certainly looks prematurely old. (On the other hand she doesn't have glasses. More proof that eye conditions are so mental/psychic). Plus I don't eat too much sugar compared to most people so i wouldn't have the leaching of minerals from me that they have. But it is all a bit confusing because apparently your bone density can change over 6 months and in the last year i've started consuming a bit of milk again and been quite lax on the amount of sugar i eat. Given that I was agreeing with a guest speaker's message that consuming dairy is NOT good for you (esp milk as it is most indigestible) - to the point where things were starting to get a bit tense between me and a colleague who disagreed with the guy - and she had a very poor bone density reading - i wasn't able to come back and gloat about my dairy free superiority because it's just not true that i'm a dairy free girl. Also up until a month ago i'd been doing a reasonable amount of running so that would have added to my bone density. But i've stopped because working full time takes more energy and because it puts alot of pressure on me to spend all the rest of the time i have with the Boop. She's far more alert now so sneaking out early on a Saturday just can't be done and 6 days of leaving her is too traumatic, so i've stopped that exercise for a while. I'm intending to do yoga three lunchtimes a week but i haven't achieved that yet. Often work is too busy to feel comfortable slipping away for an hour and a half - esp on the days i rock in at 9:15 and leave at 4:45.

macrobiotics
I got my The Hip Chick's Guide to Macrobiotics book from Amazon and am now very keen to go macrobiotic. Except that Livewire isn't. One interesting thing the book says is that baked products are very yang and irritate the liver and make you irritable and as refined flour is out anyway it recommends avoiding pies, pastries, bread etc, at least for a while. yikes. But that explains why noodles are ok, they are rehydrated in their cooking therefore not so drying like baked products. interesting.Anyway, Jessica Porter, the author, says that to start just make sure you eat some whole grains every day. She says that their energy will bring you into a solid stable neutral centre which you will notice after 30 days of sticking with it. So I'm giving it a try. brown rice, millet, buckwheat and wild rice.... they're delicious so it's been quite enjoyable.

diets
it was weird though with all the conversations we had at work inspired by health week how little people follow nutrition. I realised I was a freak because I've read the blood zone diet book, the grain free diet, macrobiotics stuff, low carb books, Fit for Life, Matt Roberts low fat, and understand the GI. I almost fell off my chair when one of my colleagues said that she now understood the Glycaemic Index and explained how it worked and another colleague was rapt. just i couldn't understand where these people had been - but in the words of a wise man - you get that.anyway, all my readings of these diets have led me to two simple conclusions and I now have my own diet recommendation. Firstly it is probably good to give up something - like be dairy free, grain free, or wheat free or meat free or sugar free. The only problem is, i'm not really sure which one is the best one to give up. But one thing i know for sure is that every single one of these diets believes in the value of leafy green vegetables. The Jessie Mo Mountain diet is therefore this - eat a serving of leafy green vegetables at every meal (including breakfast) and then eat what you normally otherwise eat, and your health will improve. ta da!

struggles with breastfeeding
i'd kind of had enough of breastfeeding - on demand - and was wondering how to wean so i ordered myself some books from the Australian Breastfeeding Association and not so surprisingly the first book I've read has been really supportive of extended breastfeeding so I've forsaken my plans for abandoning the Boop at someone else's house for a week to wean her. And i'm putting up with her clearly demanding 'boobie' in public. too late, i read that the book recommends using a code word once your kids can talk. however the point of this post is this, the book mentioned that the benefit of breastfeeding is that it provides the great nutrition and immunity but that the attachment is also a psychological need. It allows belief in a trusting relationship to be thoroughly built. Which explains why thumb sucking is soothing, it satisfies a need of being able to cling to something physical. The Boop is a big thumbsucker.

tooth rot
i was just wondering, as i fiddled with my very back molar, whether i had a toothache and whether i've ever really had one before, not for 10 years anyway, and wondering whether the tooth that was hurting is the one that will be pulled out by a dentist later this year because of rot, when i heard snap crunch noise and a whole chunk of tooth broke off and fell out of my mouth. i must admit, i examined it with the same delight as when i examined my teeth when they fell out when i was a kid - and it was about the same size. so there's a lot of molar left there still, it feels a bit better actually, but there is a very sharp bit that i can see might cause me pain when i'm eating. will no doubt discover raw nerves anon.