Chapter One

The first room your baby lives in is the pear-shaped organ called the uterus, which we know as the nurturing womb-that safe enclosure in the mother's body that separates the developing fetus from the outer world. In many ways, if you make the right choices, the womb can be the greenest room on the planet. The womb is a warm and comforting place where we have all been rocked, fed, and snuggled. It supplies with natural efficiency the food, water, oxygen, hormones, vitamins and minerals, and complex brew of neurological developmental messages needed by every baby to flourish in safety and good health.

The Greenest Room on the Planet

The womb is an incredible piece of living engineering that provides an ideal environment for the amazing transformation that occurs during the forty weeks of gestation-a time when a baby's brain is developing faster than at any time later in life, at one point making one hundred thousand new neural connections an hour.

While growing and developing in this protected biosphere, your baby is intimately connected to the outside environment, including all the nutrients entering the womb, and the smells and sounds of the outer world, which have a lasting impact on her neurological, physical, mental, and anatomical development. These external influences provide you a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to give your baby a strong and healthy foundation on which to grow. In fact, at no other time in your child's life will you have this degree of control over the way her environment influences her development.

The most di