The Hart Home│Life in Pandemic Filled NJ

None of us were expecting for us to come home from Florida at the beginning of March to the world pretty much shutting down. We had taken our son to Disney World and attended my doctoral graduation. It was our first real family trip. We had also finally listed our starter home and were about to get out of attorney review on our new house. I was completely relieved because our house at the shore was most likely going to sell quickly and while our new home needed extensive renovation, it was a single family home with a lot of land and we would be able to be in there well before our second son was due in the summertime.

pandemic

Then we got back and the world fell apart. I had several days to plan online learning. Our new home fell through. No one wanted to look at our home. And then I was suddenly being a full-time mom while trying to teach both middle school and college from home.

I was absolutely exhausted. Online school was 24/7 and it required so much of me–chasing kids down, actually teaching, grading in creative ways, making sure kids had food and internet and also listening to them because so many were just as lost as I felt.

I was very happy to see school end in June.

I also moved into using my real estate license while taking care of Logan. He loves that I am home so much more and truthfully, I am much happier too. This has definitely become a time of recovery and re-figuring out what I want my life to look like. I have worked in an under-funded high poverty school for almost 10 years already. And I don’t think you realize how much of a toll it really does take on you until you’re away from it.

I’m a better mom with a lot more patience. I enjoy doing things for my family that previously I was just too tired to do like cooking dinner and baking. I also realized how much I have missed reading and writing.

I am down to weeks left in my pregnancy. Unlike with Logan, I am not fearing my maternity leave but rather really looking forward to the time I will have with both of my boys and hopefully finding just a little time for myself. I mean, I wrote a dissertation when I was out with Logan…maybe now I can get caught up with my book reviews and maybe even finally start sending in some of my research to educational journals. That’s my goal at least.

It’s a weird time to be alive. It was also a very weird time to be pregnant. And don’t even get me started on what it’s been like to try and sell a house during all of this either…I am hoping the end of summer and the fall brings us what we need.

Has New Jersey Become a Nazi State?

The following is the e-mail that I sent off to my district senator and assemblymen on Friday. I am just so disgusted. I urge you to do the same between now and Monday which is when they will be voting on this bill and these disgusting amendments:

now-3rFjKyey-antivaxpinterestjpg-1210-680

Dear Senators and Assemblymen,
I am a resident of [the Jersey shore] as well as a mother and a public school teacher. I hold a doctorate in education. I am writing to you today because I am absolutely disgusted by what is going on in Trenton concerning S2173. Many years ago, my family came to this country to escape the tyranny, but yet, here were are in 2020 being told that I will have to comply with outdated science and allow the government to dictate to me what goes into my child’s body so that he may attend a public school that I help fund through my property taxes. This is insane to me. Are we Nazis? As an educator am I going to be expected to follow the ways of the Gestapo and single out unvaccinated and vaccinated children in my school? This amendment is beyond ridiculous– posting on a school building the number of unvaccinated children? What is next? Also sharing how many kids with Hepatitis and HIV we educate? This is a gross violation of student and family privacy and has no place in public education.
This bill in its entirety is a gross example of government overreach. It is taking away rights of our citizens and of parents to make the best decisions for their children and their families. To allow this to pass will be a gross miscarriage of justice and will result in many families pulling their children out of schools all together. This will be large enough where school funding will be hit hard.
As Americans, we are entitled to practice our religion freely and our kids are entitled to a FREE PUBLIC EDUCATION that is FREE OF DISCRIMMINATION– all this bill will do is create an “US” and a “THEM.” Hitler rose to power in a very similar way– he was welcomed by the masses who slowly began to believe in the “US” and “THEM.” By removing children from public education that is funded by their parent’s property taxes and forcing them to pay for private school is just modern day segregation and also not a reality for most New Jersey families. Further, black males are the population who have shown the highest risk of vaccine injury and are often highly represented in high poverty communities. They will be forced to vaccinate because there is no way that students living in high poverty will ever be able to afford a private education. How is this not modern day segregation and enslavement??
I implore you Senator, to do the right thing and stand with the people of NJ and their God-given rights to practice their religion and their approaches to parenting in how they see fit.
Sincerely,
Dr. Katherine Kuzma-Beck Hart

The Hart Home│New Jersey Parents Won the Battle of Religious Freedom

It was 2004 when I really began working with children. I was fresh out of high school and I had began doing summer camp before I went off to college. I remember that part of my life very vividly because it was the beginning of my thinking about becoming a teacher, but more so, I remember thinking how different these kids were compared to the ones that I had only baby sat 4 years ago.

I had kids with peanut allergies so severe that they had to sit at peanut free tables and one kid, had to have an epi pen near him at all times just in case he so much as breathed a speck of peanut dust. It was mind blowing me to me and even though I was only 17 at the time, I did wonder what was causing all of this because it just wasn’t normal. Something had to be causing this whether it was in utero or something else that they were being exposed to.

0B8AD1A0-2BF1-41EF-8430-3F9090A45176.jpeg

I never questioned vaccines. And that summer I also had to get vaccinated for meningitis so that I could live in a dorm.

Years later, I was a new teacher and went to the doctors to have blood work done. They did a full work up including blood panels and later called me to tell me that I had “waning immunity to meningitis and needed to get the shot again.” I remember being scared–how did I make it through living in a dorm and not getting meningitis? I had gotten the shot, how could it not have worked? Vaccines work! And I stupidly made an appointment and I got a double shot of meningitis.

That was the year I got sick with every little thing that was around me and at the time, I chalked it up to teaching, but I had been teaching for several years at that point, you’re usually not getting everything after three years of exposure to all kinds of kid germs.

When my son was born, I really went down the rabbit hole because I wanted to really know exactly what I was giving him. And it blew my mind. It scared me what we do to kids because we think we’re protecting them. We’re not. We’re injecting them with all kinds of junk that causes so many other autoimmune disorders and yes, even mental disorders. As a teacher who works with special education students, I have seen it grow worse. Kids who can not control their body, their words, their impulses…the list goes on and on. We are slamming their growing and developing brains and bodies with aborted fetal DNA, animal DNA and a host of known neurotoxins from the time they are growing in our bodies to they are adults themselves.

However, in this entire debate, what shocks me the most is how you have so many people (most aren’t even parents) that think that they have a right to berate you for so much as even questioning vaccines. I remember when my journey began with my son, a woman that I had grown up with and who I haven’t spoken to outside of likes on Facebook for many years, commented that I should “focus on my PhD in education and let real doctors research the science.” I laughed and it only fueled my journey more. We all need to come together and agree at the heart of either side of this, are parents that love their children and want what is best for them. We also really need to look at these liability free products that are manufactured by the same Big Pharma companies that gave us the opioid epidemic and wonder why it is that after they were granted immunity from the law, that they haven’t done a safety study like they were supposed to over the last 30 years? And it’s not because these products are safe. In fact, the supreme court has even ruled that vaccines are unavoidably unsafe.

So, knowing all of this, why do we have state officials thinking they have any right to our bodies or those of our children? If you watched the proceedings yesterday in Trenton, you witnessed how Steve Sweeney, an uneducated, unintelligent, puppet of the Big Pharma companies try to bully and strong arm this bill through because he has taken over $100,000 in campaign money from these very same companies. He was shaken and sweating last night as the state house shook with the chants of 6,000 parents outside who were not going to let this political thug come between themselves, their children, their pediatrician and their God.

As parents in this state, we need to repeat what we did in Trenton yesterday and make our voice heard loud and clear: our bodies are not governments to buy and sell and neither are those of our children’s. Laws like S2173 violate our constitutional rights to freedom of religion and they also violate federal law which states that everyone is entitled to a free, public education that is free of discrimination.

Pulling kids out of schools to homeschool is not the solution because they’ll just come for them next. And for those people who support these bills and think that that is the only solution, I then ask, will families who do not support vaccination then get a full refund of the property taxes allocated to schools since they are barred from entering them themselves?

S2173 will appear again in January and we parents need to fight for our rights to raise our children as, we their parents, see fit…not big government, not Steve Sweeney and not Big Pharma.

Thank you to the senators who stood on their moral ground and said no to the bullies in Trenton yesterday. Thank you Senators Joe Lagana, Mike Testa, and Vin Gopal. We appreciate what you did for us and it will be remembered in next year’s elections.

The Hart Home│Religious Freedom is Under Attack in NJ

This Thursday, December 12th, the assembly in NJ will be making a decision concerning religious exemptions in New Jersey for families who do not vaccinate their children due to deeply held religious beliefs but send them to public school. Until now, we have had the freedoms to make the choice to protect our religious beliefs by not vaccinating our children and we were able to send out children to public schools. Schools that we fund with our ever-growing property taxes.

Now, NJ democrats are trying to get this in around the holidays hoping that people will be too distracted to notice that they want 35,000 of NJ families who are currently using a religious exemption (about 2.5% of the population in NJ) to have their children removed from public education.

This disgusts me on so may levels. First, as a public educator, it is my job to ensure that my students receive an education that is free from discrimination. However, this will not be the case for many families who refuse to vaccinate their children. They will be forced to home school, but I am sure, much like California, once this passes they will be moving towards forcing even homeschoolers to vaccinate and submit documentation.

As a catholic woman, this further disgusts me because I live in the United States of America where I have constitutional rights to practice my religion freely. Further, as a catholic I am completely pro-life and I do not believe in the killing of anyone, but in this instance I do not believe it is God’s law that babies are aborted, killed, so that these scientists can get immortal cell lines to grow these vaccines to then inject my son with fragmented DNA from dead children. This violates God’s law in that he shall not murder and it also violates his word that we must keep our blood pure. Vaccines are biologics. You are injecting your children with much more than just a weakened infection.

And as a mother, this disgusts me because it makes big government dictate to me how I am to raise the child that God has given me. It violates my deeply held beliefs and seeks to put me against my God. It is disgusting that NJ government can even entertain the idea that they have any right to do so.

This bill is just the beginning of what they want to do to New Jersey. Up next? A bill that would mandate the HPV vaccine which is killing, paralyzing and sterilizing kids for NINE YEAR OLDS. Why does a 9-year-old need to be vaccinated for a disease that is only spread through sex? There is no logic behind it and I could go on about the deep seeded corruption in government and how their hands are deep in the Big Pharma pockets, but I won’t because this week, that is not at issue.

This week is about how NJ wants to strip me and my son of our constitutional rights to practice our religion freely and to not inject ourselves with DNA from dead babies. By doing so we are complicit to the murder of innocent lives and we are not right with our God. I am praying hard for NJ.

Call to Action:

IF you are just as appalled by all of this, like I am, you need to contact your senator and really, any NJ senator and express your concerns about your religious freedoms. You need to show up at the state house annex in Trenton on Thursday and express your disgust for this totalitarian bill. YOU need to FIGHT for YOUR RIGHTS. You can not be complicit. This is not about being pro or anti, it’s about keeping YOUR RIGHTS to YOUR KIDS.

Sponsored│Goumi Kids Pajama Deal

Anyone else have a baby that that would live in pajamas if they could? Logan is OBSESSED with comfy clothes and threw a tantrum when I dared put him in dress pants and a bow tie for Easter. The outfit lasted long enough for maybe two pictures before I put him into a cotton t-shirt and pants and the angry dinosaur that my baby had become quickly calmed back down to his super cute self. Goumi Kids is offering 15% off all pajamas right now through my link using code ALLS15. Logan loved their sets when he was younger and the best part? They go down to PREEMIE sizes! You can also snag booties, mittens and sleep sacks for your little love. Snag your coupon and deal below:


15% off Baby Rompers at Goumikids.com. Code AllS15.

The Hart Home│Are you fearful of another pregnancy?

My husband and I do not hide the fact that if God allows it, we would like to have four kids. I would like two of each because I think the idea of everyone having a brother and a sister. However, I really don’t care either way as long as I get one of each in this mix.

I was very blessed to conceive our son easily. I had been convinced that it would take us a while and that I would probably have fertility issues. After we visited our doctor, we were told to go home and try for a year before they intervened. I immediately hit the books and from there ordered my pre-natal vitamins and ovulation kits and downloaded a log to keep track of my cycles. I was determined. I also followed every forum and app on TTC I could find and read daily how and when in cycles women were actually conceiving.

meandlogan
One of our first pictures together. August 2018.

I was a bit obsessed, but deep within myself, I had always wanted to be a mother. However, I have also always been very career and academically driven and for years that was my sole focus. I laugh at myself now for thinking that I would go back to work a month after having delivered our son. I also laugh at a conversation that I had with my husband when we first started dating. I flat out told him that I would never give up my career or my dreams for any man nor would I move for one. Which is funny because, in the end, I moved for my husband so that he could finish school and now, I am constantly applying to jobs that I can do closer to home or even remotely so that I can be home with our son. My husband constantly likes to remind me about that conversation and how it’s so funny that this little man entered my life and I am just wrapped around his finger. And it’s true, Logan is the boss of my life now and if it doesn’t benefit him, I don’t do it. Everyone was floored when I took an actual spring break this year and have planned to do the same for summer. I haven’t actually had a true summer since I graduated from Rutgers. I can’t count my first summer with Phil because while backpacking through Europe was definitely a summer, it too was a lot of work. This will be the first summer where I will have no work, no deadlines just an endless amount of time with my baby.

Which has led us to the serious questions of when we want to expand our family again. Since we did not start our family when I was in my 20’s, I know that I do not have much time to finish building our family either. I think by 36, you’re already considered geriatric when it comes to pregnancy. It made me realize how scared I was to get pregnant again. With Logan, my pregnancy was uncomplicated other than being sick every day with him and in the end, I only gained 10 pounds and after deilvery, I wound up losing almost 50 within the first months of being home. My delivery was complicated. I was 42 weeks pregnant and induced for two days. We developed an infection on the morning of the 3rd day and I was rushed in for an emergency c-section where I got to meet the most perfect little boy.

We had 3 days together in the hospital and just as they were about to discharge me, my blood pressure shot through the roof and I was diagnosed with postpartum pre-eclampsia which affects 1 in 600 pregnancies. I had never even heard of that. I spent the next day being infused with magnesium sulfite and dealing with the craziest bunch of nurses I had ever dealt with. They had me on hefty drugs for the c-section, but when I developed a headache from lack of sleep, the magnesium and I am sure the overall stress, I had a nurse get into a fight with me over it. It was just such a whacky experience and we had driven 45 minutes to deliver at that hospital because in New Jersey it is known as THE baby hospital. I was so unimpressed. And the real kicker, the epidural? Didn’t even work! I felt it ALL.

I have been scared of and distant from my husband for months because I was terrified of going through all of that again. It’s taken me a while to even think that at some point I would like to have another baby to grow our family. I think this time though, I would find a midwife that specializes in VBAC and home birth because I never want to go through a c-section again nor do I want to deal with that hospital or any hospital for that matter unless I absolutely have to. I think all of the medical interventions that I believed in for my first pregnancy contributed to my difficult delivery and if God does bless us with another (or three more children), I definitely will not be repeating my first birth experience.

Are Moms and Dads that Different?

My son has reached a point in his development where he knows that I leave in the morning and he does not like it. He has the most heartbreaking yet oddly adorable cry face too which just means he knows how to pull it out to get me to cave in .1 seconds.

He needs me to hold him. All the time. From the moment I get home at night, I am holding him and carrying him around with everything that I do. This was much easier when he was smaller and less mobile and therefore, easily wearable and between that and my body heat, would spend much of his time napping. Now, not so much.

This morning I was running late for work because my son had woken up and immediately wanted to nurse. I have IMMENSE guilt when I turn him down from nursing, so I will always nurse him when he asks for it. He nurses and then once he’s more awake he wants to cuddle and be held, only I REALLY have to pee and shower and get ready to go. I attempt to put him into his pack and play which is just explosive tears the moment he realizes that he’s headed for it.

Quickly, I hold onto him and run to the bathroom. And yes, I pee while I am holding him and he’s happy and chatting as he plays with my necklace. It is 100% true: you lose all privacy once you become a mom and as a mom, your kid will be in the bathroom with you.

Enter my husband.

He just starts shaking his head when it finds us there and takes our son from me.

“We have to get on the same page,” he tells me. I roll my eyes. My mom never let us cry needlessly or for anything when we were my son’s age. You can not spoil someone with love. You can spoil them with things, but that’s something for when he’s older to be worried about.

“Why do you think he’s so different and calm when I’m home? He’s secure. He knows I will be there when he cries.” Then my husband rolls his eyes.

“You’re going to turn him into a mama’s boy.”

And here’s where I zing him good. “Well, apple…tree.” I wink. My husband is further not amused. “And, he’s already a mama’s boy. He’s making little mmm and momom sounds when he cries now because he knows I will be there. We’re working on the official, mama.”

“Go to work.”

The irony in all of it though is that while I am teaching today, our son will be sitting on the couch with my husband as my husband does work for school and my son watches wrestling or cartoons and takes his nap. Then I’ll be home and we’ll switch to Murder, She Wrote and Little House on the Prairie and we’ll sit cuddling and sharing my evening yogurt that he has become obsessed with and the night will go on.

As different as moms and dads are, I think they’re also a lot more alike than they are different. Moms just have more patience and are more open to giving up personal freedoms such as peeing without a small audience.

 

Baby Led Weaning is a Life Saver

It is a fact that my son did not want to be born.

I did EVERYTHING I possibly could to start labor.

I walked, ate hot food, bounced on a ball, did all kinds of stretches…everything, but I would not dilate and the moment the doctor said they were willing to induce, I jumped on it because being 42 weeks pregnant with a nearly 10 pound baby is life’s slowest form of torture.

Only once he was born, all our Logan wants to do is grow up. Physically, he is ahead of every benchmark. He was already trying to roll over in the hospital and was picking his head up. By 6 months old, he was using his play stroller and taking steps. There is no stopping him.

Baby-Led Feeding

I started him on home made purees at 4 1/2 months by almost 6 months, he was grabbing the spoon from my hand to feed himself. I did pre-loaded spoons for awhile that he would take and eat from, but then we reached a point where even that was frustrating for him so, I began to research baby led weaning.

It really freaked me out at first because I was terrified that he would choke. However, it has been such a life saver. He is so much happier when he has strips of food in front of him and he tries so much more food now. This morning he ate more than half of his breakfast.

It’s also teaching me more about foods. It makes me have to cook for my family even on nights when I am exhausted from work and school. I know what’s in food now and I have finally shifted over to a almost completely organic food list. We replaced cow’s milk with fortified almond milk. Even the cleaners I have used have gone from whatever name brand my mom used to get to plant based products. Logan continues to change us everyday and it’s almost fun to see what new challenge he’s going to give me and how quick I can figure out how I’m going to be the best mom for him.

French Scenes & Mommy Life

I was 20 years old and riding a train to either Versailles or Fontainebleau. At that time in my life, I was a devoted student of art history who waffled between going to graduate school for art history or maybe doing something entirely different and going for something like nursing because as passionate as I have always been about art, I have also always loved taking care of people too.

I sat chatting with my professor about what I wanted to do and it was to my shock that he flat out told me that I was not cut out for a doctorate in art history. A woman who was older and had come with us as a graduate student overheard the entire exchange and later pulled me aside and gave me the best advice: follow your heart no matter what other people tell you.

601803_797945116417_97264762_n
20 year old me in Paris, France. 

And in the end I did. I turned down 3 graduate school acceptances for the museum side of art history and went into teaching. In the end I found a way to integrate my background in art with my passion for education and literature. I had no idea I would ever hit that point had you asked me as a 20-something on a train to a former royal residence, however, I think it’s pretty cool that in the end I became that person.

I don’t know what made me think of that little piece of my life today, but I did. I loved that part of my life. I loved living in the art library and taking days filled with art history classes and memorizing a million slides. Some times like today when I am thinking of that time in my life, I really do miss it.

I miss the c’est la vie of it all.

Then I look at my almost completed doctoral dissertation…began writing my final chapter today and I watch my son carry on his living room expeditions and I know I am right where I am supposed to be even though I do wish I was able to take more museum trips and I wouldn’t mind another afternoon researching in the art library, but maybe that will be my life in a future season.