I can’t help myself. This is a bit of a soap box post prompted by recent news articles, especially one about the celebrity obsession with losing weight and getting your “body back” after having a baby (a shout out to Jenn for sending me the link). Getting your body back from where, I don’t know? From the baby you just had? Why would you want to pretend like your body didn’t do the most amazing thing it could ever do ever? I also keep on repeating a phrase from Katy Bowman’s recent blog post: “Fit is not functional.” FYI: If you haven’t looked at her blog, do it now. She changed the way I view my human machine. I’ll elaborate on Katy’s phrase:

“Skinny” or “Fat” is not fit and not functional. Weight is not fit and not functional. These are terms that may affect the functionality of your body, but they in themselves do not mean much about the way your body works.

If you chronically hurt from your workouts or the way you move your body, you may be fit, but you aren’t functional. If you think about your mom body in terms of image and not function, what in the world are you doing? When you picture your best mom body, do you picture the bikini on the beach or do you picture lifting your baby without hurting yourself? If you picture your mom body, do you picture your belly or your breasts as immobile objects that should look good, or do you picture growing and feeding your child?  And even if you are a mom who didn’t give birth to your own child, do you think about your relationship to your body as a vehicle in which you move through the world, or do you think about fitting into a pair of jeans? Do you do a mommy boot camp to lose the weight regardless of whether you can injure yourself? Do you believe the stupid mantra that if you aren’t sweating buckets you aren’t working hard enough or if you aren’t hurting, you didn’t go far enough, or do you believe that health is about feeling good because you actually feel good and not feeling good because you are picturing others looking at your body and liking it?

You can want to look good in a bikini and want to fit into your jeans and want to lose the weight because vanity in and of itself isn’t immoral or a sign you are a bad person, but if you only think of your body in a static, how do I look in my facebook pictures kind of way, you are missing the health boat. Mothers are living organisms who either gave birth to other living organisms or have been trusted with the life of other living organisms. Thin is not health. Abs are not health. Heels are not health. Fit is not health. Functionality is health. Now I have to go and sit on an airplane for way too long. And as a disclaimer so I don’t sound holier than thou: I do hurt from lifting my baby and I won’t be wearing a bikini anytime soon. I do fit into my jeans, but I still vainly worry about my belly. I like the occasional workout even if I know walking is best for me and I’m not a health saint in the least.

Why oh why can’t politicians and journalists talk about stay at home moms without sounding tone deaf? The majority of moms work outside the home, but about a 1/4 stay home. After political consultant Hilary Rosen’s completely tone deaf and politically stupid comment about Ann Romney, the Internet is blowing up with people criticizing or defending Rosen (She said that Ann Romney had “never worked a day in her life.”) The Right is using this moment to valorize stay at home moms and pretend like they are the party for Women, while the Left is trying to defend Rosen by suggesting the opportunity to be a stay at home mom is limited to the elite. To be fair, President Obama quickly distanced himself from Rosen, and Rosen eventually apologized.

What I have noticed through limited observation of media op-eds about this political snafu is that most people don’t know who stay at home moms are. We are the minority. Some of us want to stay home, some are forced by economic circumstances, and some are working at home, a category of work I haven’t seen mentioned in the media pieces on Rosen, but really one of the oldest of the family economy, going back to at least the 17th century. Sidenote: Why are dads who work from home freelancers, while moms who work from home take the clunky “Work at Home Mom” title?

If you Google for all of five minutes, the 2010 census records come up, making a few facts clear. Stay at home moms are more likely to be young, Hispanic, and without a high school education than those who work. They are also more likely to have preschool age children or younger, suggesting the snapshot some journalists are providing of the rich SAHM is inaccurate, but more importantly that work is fluid for moms. Not all stay at home moms stay that way forever or neatly fit a political category.

Sure, many SAHMS are wealthy compared to the general population. My husband is in the military and I’m lucky we can live off his one income and even pay for some daycare so that on certain days I only have to care for one child. But for many other families, the cost of childcare, especially for more than one child, makes working outside the home economically unrealistic, certainly not the financial luxury it has been painted. And for many other women, the recession is still affecting their marketability. My point, we aren’t all incredibly wealthy Ann Romneys.

I’m a registered Democrat, so I’m not exactly trying to defend Romney. To be honest, sometimes I wonder how women can be so bad at talking about other women. Why are we surprised that any category of women, even the lauded or derided stay at home mom, won’t fit neatly into the vision we want of women? Just like all women anywhere or ever, we are not saints for caring for our children or villains for living off our husband’s income. It’s 2012. I expect the conversation about moms to sound a little less medieval.

Like pretty much everyone everywhere, perhaps a slight exaggeration, the fam is getting over an early spring cold. Rather oddly Dave and I have gotten this thing in piecemeal. A sore throat one day, then stuffy nose, etc… without a whole lot of overlapping symptoms. Amelia, the family carrier of said cold because of her triweekly daycare (does triweekly mean every three weeks or 3x a week?) still has a slight runny nose, but manages to never act sick even as she is coughing up a lung. Henry on the other hand, wee little babe, still looks pathetic. He suffers the most because his immune system is still wee and little.

When I told my parents Henry and Amelia were sick, my mom said “still” and I had to correct “again.” They were well for like two weeks in between colds. Since Amelia seems unaffected by her snot, I haven’t minded her sicknesses all that much, but poor Henry has had three colds in his 4 1/2 months of life. Amelia didn’t get her first cold until she was like 9 months old, maybe older, I can’t remember. Henry got his first cold at weeks old.

The cause of these colds is obvious. Amelia goes to a small in home daycare, picks up a bug, and smears it around the family. I had read somewhere that getting a cold a month, although on the frequent side, isn’t unheard of for toddlers. I also know a lot of moms who have stopped going to kid heavy places because their kids will ALWAYS get sick, but for them this always can include frequent ear infections and other issues that aren’t as easily wiped off as Amelia’s runny nose. Bummer. Still, if you see a child with a bit of crusty snot at the local park, you don’t need to give his/her mother the evil eye for leaving the house, as if we should all quarantine the sniffles.

I also know of moms whose kids never get sick, the moms who credit their breastfeeding for supplying some magic elixir, or credit their healthy family habits. Hate to break the bad news, but Henry has only been breastfeed and it hasn’t stopped the colds, even though it may have lessened the severity of them, hard to tell. Also, as soon as your one child starts to interact with other kids, I’m afraid no matter how healthy you think you live, a cold is gonna happen sooner or later.

That said, I was curious. Is going to daycare really bad for a kid’s immune system? Luckily, at least one study suggests the opposite. A couple years ago, CNN and other news outlets wrote brief articles about a study in the Archives of Adolescent and Pediatric Medicine that showed Canadian kids in large day-care settings before the age of 2 1/2 getting more ear and respiratory infections than those cared for at home, but then once starting school getting fewer of these ailments than their peers. The authors of the study commented that although the increased rate of infections was much greater (61%) in the preschool years, it may put the kids at an advantage during the school years because they would miss fewer days when learning to read and write. Okay, so this study isn’t a perfect vehicle for talking about Amelia’s care. 1) She doesn’t go to a large daycare setting and 2) She isn’t getting those infections anyway, just the colds. However, what I took from this was don’t worry if your kid is getting sick. Your child isn’t some sickly creature, just doing a little prep work for school.

Now that I could stop worrying about the frequency of colds, I started to wonder, why do kids get so many. Am I doing something wrong? An article on The Children’s Physician Network explains that colds are simply caused by new viruses. Since we can get at least 200 different viruses, the younger body, i.e. the less exposed body, is more susceptible to these viruses. On average, a baby and toddler gets 8 colds a year, and that is just the average, so more or less isn’t out of the ordinary. The article also notes, “Colds are not caused by poor diet or lack of vitamins. They are not caused by bad weather, air conditioners, or wet feet.” Good to know. Of course common sense says not taking care of yourself may prolong and worsen the symptoms, but it ain’t the cause of the virus.  Colds may be annoying, especially when infections are part of the equation, but out of all the parenting worries, this is starting to fall lower and lower on my paranoia totem pole.

My last post was poking fun at the decorating/organizing blogs popping up on the Internet, but truthfully I LOVE those blogs. They give me crafty hope and they are a bit like organization porn, a guilty pleasure because I’m sure I should be doing something else with the time I spend contemplating minutiae projects (my term), projects like painting drawer knobs or cutting out chalkboard labels.

My new favorite blog and the one I actually read on a regular basis is i heart organizing. I used to do a mommy blogger spotlight, but, let’s be honest, I have two kids and can’t spend my time reading scores of blogs, which is why I’ll only mention here and there any I truly can’t live without. I’m a little obsessed with i heart organizing, maybe because the projects seem manageable or because the posts are usually short and heavy on pictures or because I’m a sucker for stripes and chevrons. Yes, these particular decorative touches are cliches, even Target carries a chevron line, but they are bright and simple and make me happy.

i heart organizing is a blogger framework at blogspot domain, but has like a zillion followers. Jen, the author, recently posted links to other blogs about organization and I had to stop myself from clicking on all of them. I’m obsessed in the way a person who really can’t sing imagines winning American Idol (or maybe The Voice is a more culturally relevant reference…I don’t watch either). I can’t sew, paint, even glue a straight line on a bin labeled “crafts,” but I like to watch other people make their homes pretty and neat. I tell Dave I am the Idea Woman, so maybe I can come up with crafty projects and commission others to do them for me. Oh wait, that’s called Etsy.

I’m pretty sure my penchant for home organization is a phase. I actually don’t get much joy from crafts. I like to look at the finished project, but when I’m painting or laminating or shopping at the craft store, I’m really thinking “when can this thing just be done already.” I told Dave at lunch today that I discovered why I’m suddenly obsessed with organization. I explained that I hope it will save me time in the long run and that if I’m stuck in the house for most of the day, I want to look at pretty things. And when Amelia ransacks our home, I’d like to at least know everything has a place. Dave listened to me babble on about my self-diagnosed neurosis and when I finally paused, said “I just assumed it was a control thing.” Yeah, that too. Here is a picture of a minor craft that took me way too long.

Try and ignore the slightly racist letter "I"

Before you get too impressed, all I did was find the prints of vintage flashcards on Etsy, order them, go to Staples and have them print and laminate them, cut them out, affix removable sticky squares to the back, and position them ever so exactly above Amelia’s toy cubbies. Of course, Amelia promptly started to rip them off the wall. I should have foreseen that as I walked back and forth to Staples.  I do crafty like Sandra Lee does cooking.

Are you overthinking parenting? An economist explains why this might be a waste of time.

As you may have noticed, I’ve cut down on my posts to roughly two a week. I was contemplating just doing away with the Newsroom category altogether, but then I remembered that while my production has decreased my internet consumption has not. I’m crediting my insatiable appetite for knowledge and not my poor parenting skills for this constancy (but to be fair, I am at my parents’ house and have someone else to amuse Amelia, so it’s not like I’m neglecting her. Do you hear that Dad? I’m not neglecting her. This is my vacation). Anyway, enough inappropriate insights into my family dynamics and on to the cool stuff I’ve found online.

I have an undergraduate degree in English and History and a graduate degree in English, oh so helpful degrees for my current line of work as a stay at home mom, so of course I’m now wishing I had become a behavioral economist (or a biomechanist, but I’ll save that for another post). I can’t redo my entire education, but I can listen to the Freakonomics podcasts. I never read the book and only accidentally stumbled across the podcasts when doing an iTunes search in preparation for the long drive up to Sacramento. Now I listen to the Stephens every day as I go for a walk.

I cringed when I saw a title of an episode called “The Economists Guide to Parenting.”  I’m so sick of someone telling me how to parent, but the episode was actually pretty awesome. That’s the nice thing about economists. They crunch the numbers and leave the moralizing to a minimum. They also prove numbers are only part of the parenting equation. Even economists can’t help but do things they know have no quantifiable parenting effect (proving that not everything needs to be quantifiable to be important). Some of the more interesting tidbits include the following:

That baby sign language you are teaching little Johnnie won’t make him any smarter, but the fact that you are the type of person that would even bother with baby sign language will help him in life.

If you smoke and drink to excess, count on kids who do the same. Kicking bad habits is way more important than trying to make your kids smarter.

Be kind. Kids remember that kind of thing.

They talk about a lot more, which is why you should listen to the podcast and then subscribe to it so that I’m not the only annoying person constantly saying “I heard on the Freakonomics podcast…”

Potty training. Yuck. My brain is about to explode. I literally just read a 50 page evidence report called “The Effectiveness of Different Methods of Toilet Training for Bowel and Bladder Control” done by The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. It was about as exciting as it sounds.

Why was I reading an evidence report, the kind of literature that includes lots of abstracts and objectives and executive summaries? I’m starting to not trust anything about toilet training and it’s driving me crazy. Some people claim we Americans are waiting too long  (white Americans I should say) by pushing toilet training to 2.5, 3, or even beyond years. Others suggest we make like our forebears and Europeans and force the issue before 18 months. Still others are all about elimination communication, the practice of toilet training from birth. Some say do it all in a day. Others say wait for the kid to decide. The American Academy of Pediatrics and Mayo Clinic support the child readiness approach, as does the Canadian version of the AAP, but Google toilet training and you will find a plethora of opinions, most of which have very little actual research to back them up, which means like with so many other parenting topics, no one really knows what is best.

What is an overthinking girl to do? Look up dry reports that analyze the limited studies that have been done. This evidence report from 2006 notes that healthy children will be potty trained by most methods, but that when comparing the Azrin-Foxx method to the child-oriented approach, the Azrin-Foxx achieves results faster with as good if not better follow up results. Still, overall, the difference between the two isn’t that great. In other words, both will work. Okay, then I want the one that works better. Azrin-Foxx it is.

But what exactly is that method. I found their 1970s book on Amazon advertising to potty train your kid in one day. I guess it can work, as long as you wait until your kid is showing at least some signs of readiness. For the record, my almost 16 month old is not showing the signs. However, despite mostly positive reviews, a couple negative reviews of the book noted it can be harsh, e.g. marching your kid in wet undies to the toilet 10 x and telling him how upset people will be that he wet his pants, although, to be fair, a lot of positive reinforcement is also required. You also have to somehow get your child to sit for 10 minutes on the potty. As one reviewer noted, how exactly does one do that? Hmmm. Maybe this approach, although effective, isn’t going to work with my personality. I like things to be done fast, but I really can’t see Amelia sitting still and I just imagine a really stressful day that may or may not result in some level of toilet training.

Elimination communication is also out because I already missed that boat and I think having to read all the bathroom cues is a little overwhelming and not very practical for anything other than a first child, meaning baby #2 ain’t gonna do that method either.

I found some books advertising a three day version of the Azrin-Foxx method, a version that can be started even sooner than that one, yet requires three months of a diaper free baby. I’ve already learned the joys of steam cleaning our rental carpet and the last thing I want to do is watch a diaper less baby in the house while also caring for a newborn, so I suppose that method is out as well.

This leaves the most common and lengthy child-led approach. According to the evidence report, if you start potty training around 18 months (as in introducing the concept), your child should be consistently going without accidents 10 months later. Wow. I had no idea it could take so long. This is the approach that involves getting your child used to the potty, putting her on it every once and a while, then moving to training pants, etc…  If you wait too long you can have a very obstinate child who refuses to poop in the toilet and if you try too early, you will frustrate yourself. Now I see why the other early toilet training methods, although labor intensive, are appealing to people. I really really really hate changing Amelia’s diaper. She screams and wriggles around and makes life generally miserable. At the same time, the thought of being locked in the kitchen with her for one day or three makes me cringe.

I guess I’ll go with the gradual approach even if none of them seem appealing. I told Dave I would do the “normal” thing for this one parenting topic, realizing as I said this that “normal” is relative. What is normal in America isn’t normal in other countries. What is normal for white Americans apparently isn’t as normal for black Americans (I had no idea). Instead, we’ll do the approach that fits both Amelia’s and my personalities. That kid hates to be forced to do anything and I love order and schedules. Not a great combo. In my mind, I start potty training her at 18 months by slowly introducing the concept and we magically reach a conclusion in a few months. However, I absolutely know that won’t work. All the methods have one thing in common. They recommend not starting the process when another baby is arriving. Amelia will be 19 months when baby #2 makes his grand entrance. She has already gotten jealous of the little doll we are pretending is the new baby. Even if early toilet training is preferable for some, I can’t see it working out logistically for Amelia or me.  Plus, who said anything old and European has to be superior? The history of potty training is not a straight line from wonderful early training to wussy child led training. That’s what I keep telling myself anyway. We’ll see how it goes. Maybe in 8 months I will be locked in a kitchen with Amelia after all, pumping her full of liquids and begging her to sit on the potty.

Image: ntwowe / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I have a problem, but not one I’m willing to solve any time soon. I read too many parenting books, hardly a surprise (the blog is called overthinking mom after all). I read a ton before Amelia was born and then revolted against these books by doing a podcast on the history of mothering manuals, revealing the changing and contradictory advice peddled to make moms feel guilty throughout the centuries (information I got from reading a book about this history). I stopped reading for a while (maybe a couple months), but then Amelia had colic, so I read about that. Now, at 15 months, my precious non-colicky new toddler is super spirited, which I actually love about her, but I’m exhausted. What do I do when exhausted? I read.

The first time around I was overwhelmed by the contradictory advice. Now I’m a bit more confident in my parenting choices and have learned what to toss aside and what to take to heart, not that the advice I’m tossing aside is garbage, but at some point you have to decide if you are a crib mom or a co-sleeper, a cry it out or an attachment parent, a time outer or a connector, etc…

I’ve also learned that you don’t have to pick a clear side, as in I will follow the teachings of any one so called expert and no one else. You’d be surprised how many people pick Sears or the Babywise people or Weissbluth or Ferber or Karp or Kurcinka or Love and Logicers or even the Nanny 911 lady and model all their parenting choices off of that person’s philosophy. And then there is the rest of the non-yuppie non- stay at home mom world that just gets on with it and leaves the books alone. Oh, how I wish I was one of those “get on with it” moms, but that’s not my nature. I know that isn’t my nature because I read about my nature in a book (Kurcinka’s, the current selection on my kindle).

Anyway, if I can’t follow the teachings of one person and I can’t bring myself to stop reading altogether, especially because Amelia’s spirited nature has left me a bit befuddled about the best way to parent her in the particular high pitched emotional moments, I’m left with a pile of books through which I’m sorting. This is pregnancy nesting gone to the extreme. I literally just bought a 20% off notebook from poor defunct Borders (and by the way, I expected a bigger discount, poor defunct Borders) for the sole purpose of synthesizing the tidbits of info from each book that make the most sense to me. Instead of fuming about how all the books differ, I’m looking for cross over.

What have I found? The code phrase for the 2000s is “emotional intelligence.” If you are worried about IQ, that was so last century, so you can totally get over it. I’ve even read books about how I need to stop worrying and should read fewer books. I kinda love that irony. To be honest, I’m not even that worried and all this reading reveals less about my parenting anxiety than it does about my scholastic temperament. When I was in school, I was always the girl who did way too much research. I wasn’t looking for the solution to any problem, but rather believed and believe that reading in moderation is more dangerous than not reading at all. What do I mean by this? I mean picking just one book leaves you easily convinced about that advice and doesn’t leave much room for differences of opinion. It’s like only watching Fox News. It can make you sanctimonious about your parenting choices. And that is annoying.

Unfortunately for my husband and anyone who knows me, reading anything and everything has made me annoying in a different way. It has turned me into a bookish know it all. For his sake, I will admit I absolutely don’t know it all about parenting, and although reading all these books has taught me a lot about the parenting book genre, I have to keep on reminding myself that parenting and parenting books are two completely different beasts. Every time I try a piece of advice from a book and it doesn’t “work” on my daughter, I’m reminded reading is a lovely hobby, but not even close to the actual parenting experience. That said, a post-academic has to research something, so why not the being that came out of my womb. Or maybe I should just join a book club or take up a crafty hobby like other normal people.

Image: thephotoholic / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

A few weeks ago I heard Lea Goldman on NPR’s Talk of the Nation discussing moms who voluntarily give up custody of their kids, sometimes moving across the country or to a different country entirely to pursue dreams, other relationships, or education. Goldman discusses her Marie Claire article called “What Kind of Mother Leaves Her Kids” and defends the three moms she profiles (the article itself is kinda bland, but her interview highlights what she believes is the moral of these stories).

Despite my stay at home mom and military wife status, I’m not super traditional and, before listening to the segment, was ready to reserve judgment about these women. I wondered if these moms had drug problems and gave up custody for safety reasons. Then, when I realized they did it for self-fulfillment personal reasons, I was still ready to accept that moms who choose to give up their kids should not be judged more harshly than ex-husbands who do just that all the time.

However, Goldman is incredibly unconvincing. She overstates her case by trying to make these moms some sort of trailblazing heroines and by stating over and over again that dads who do this are not judged, something I don’t really think is true.

Goldman admits moms giving up custody of their kids is actually incredibly rare. A lot of moms lose custody, but that is different from relinquishing said custody. Given that this is rare, Goldman’s attempt to make this about women’s liberation en masse rings hollow. I think she is trying to eke some sort of overarching meaning out of her brief profile of three women’s life choices.

One mom wanted to become a lawyer and knew taking care of her kids would make that impossible. True, but plenty of mom lawyers exist, as do working moms, so giving up custody doesn’t make you some motherhood martyr. Another mom tragically lost a child and gave up custody of her kids to become an author, even writing a book about losing that child. I don’t really judge these moms as much as I judge Goldman for valorizing them. Sure, people make choices for different reasons, but let’s be honest, choosing to have kids and then choosing to give them up to work on your own education or to marry a guy across the pond or to become a lawyer is, frankly, selfish. Sometimes moms need to be selfish, sometimes moms should be selfish, sometimes selfish isn’t bad, but call it what it is and stop pretending these actions are noble.

Moms (and dads) can have rooms of their own without giving up the children they chose to bring into this world. They can be authors and lawyers and can remarry and do a myriad of jobs without saying bye bye to the kiddos. Is it difficult? I imagine so. But Goldman, seriously, these women aren’t trailblazers. They are moms who gave up their kids for selfish reasons, just like many dads do, and they do not represent a growing trend, something you admit on NPR, yet the Marie Claire article still boasts the misleading subtitle “Divorcing dads give up custody every day. Increasingly, so do moms. So why are they judged more harshly for it.”

I suppose this Newsroom post is less an endorsement or critique of this particular article than a commentary on sloppy reporting and misguided editorial framing. Maybe this is why I don’t subscribe to Marie Claire anymore and maybe this is why I shouldn’t write blog posts when my husband, child, dog, and I are simultaneously sick. I get cranky.

This Newsroom post is for all you pregnant and future pregnant women out there. I pushed for almost three hours when giving birth. It sucked. The doctors gave me oxygen because I was so exhausted by the process, and the physical repercussions weren’t pretty. I learned two things from this experience: the body has an amazing ability to heal, and I don’t want to test out those particular healing powers again. I can’t change the past, but maybe I can help other women change their futures.

I recently came across a post “When Push Comes to Shove” on the blog Katy Says. Since I took three months of Bradley classes, I thought I knew a lot about natural birth (even with not having one). But I didn’t.

This is what I learned from Katy’s post:

• Stop wearing high heels. Now. It totally screws up your alignment and bad alignment is bad for pushing.

• Stand more. Work at your computer at a standing work station (I literally just put my laptop on the dresser in the middle of that sentence. I’m so guilty of sitting too much.)

• Walk a few miles EVERY DAY.

• Don’t tuck and thrust your pelvis. I’m confused about how not to do that, but check out her blog to read a description of proper alignment.

• Release your gut.

Katy does a great job of explaining the bare mechanics of pushing out a baby. I had no idea that the myometrium-the uterine muscle-is actually the strongest muscle in the body. To be honest, I hadn’t even heard of the myometrium. I think it might be my new favorite word.

Although the myometrium is the strongest muscle in the body, it needs to be trained, and, no, not through those kegels. You need to stop carrying tension in your pelvic floor muscles. I’m starting to think I overdid the kegels and contributed to more tension rather than to toned muscles before giving birth. Katy explains that the uterus is strong, but can’t work harder than it is biologically programmed. I think that means you can’t do uterine exercises. She explains, “It can only generate the force it generates, which means the more relaxed and stretched your muscles are before you get to the maternity ward or your backyard birth tub, the more effective your natural process can be.”

Something I did know before reading this article, but I am happy she emphasizes, is the totally unnatural position of most hospital births. The force of the uterus works with the force of gravity (and with the force of your baby’s head on the uterine opening) to get that baby out. As soon as you position yourself horizontally, you are making life, and pushing out someone else’s life, more difficult than it needs to be. It’s probably like trying to drink water upside down.

Epidurals numb you and totally limit your ability to get vertical. I had an epidural and I don’t really buy the arguments about the epidural itself causing harm to your baby, but I do believe it can slow down labor and slow down pushing.

Do I regret getting the epidural? No! I admire women who can have inductions sans epidurals, but I’m aware I’m not made of that kind of stock. Still, I recognize that optimal pushing requires women having use of their legs. If I hadn’t had an epidural, my pushing phase would have been shorter, Amelia likely would not have gotten stuck, and my recovery would have been easier…I think. What if-ing the past is an imprecise sport. The moral of my confusing story? I don’t regret the epidural in my particular situation, but it sure made pushing out a giant baby more difficult than it needed to be.

The uterus is a crazy strong muscle and gravity is an incredibly effective pushing helper. If I had to break down Katy’s advice into two easy steps, they would be the following: a) Walk with proper alignment before giving birth and b) push with contractions while getting gravity to help you out (or, should I say help the baby out?). She provides a lot more detail about the “expulsion phase” and the pelvic floor, so if interested, check out her entire post. Happy pushing.

You’ve probably heard about the arrest of 18 men and boys for (gang) raping an 11 year old girl in Cleveland, Texas. More men are thought to have been involved than the initial 18 arrested. The suspects range in age from middle schoolers to 27 years old. At a town hall meeting in Cleveland, supporters of the men blamed the girl for her own attack. A New York Times piece (that received much criticism and tens of thousands of emails and for which the Times recently issued a sorta apology) dwelled on quotes about how this incident would affect the futures of the men and why the mother wasn’t there. Others have said the girl dressed like a twenty year old. Some of the attackers claim they thought she was older than 11. A defense attorney used the term “willing participant” in reference to the young girl. And others have questioned the racial motives behind the prosecutions (the young girl is Hispanic and the accused men are mostly black). The attack was recorded on a cellphone and circulated at an elementary school. These are the facts.

And this is my opinion:

YOU’VE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME!

DO NOT BLAME A 6TH GRADER FOR HER OWN GANG RAPE!

DO NOT BLAME THE MOTHER!

DO NOT MAKE THIS ABOUT RACE!

EVEN IF THEY THOUGHT THE GIRL WAS OLDER, WHICH I DOUBT, RAPING ANYONE IS STILL WRONG!

BLAME THE 18 (MAYBE AS MANY AS 28) MEN AND BOYS WHO ALL DECIDED THIS WAS OKAY!

I’m not a violent person. I won’t even let Dave bring a gun into this house, but if that was my daughter and I came across any of the guys who raped her, the news story would be “Mother Arrested for Murdering with her Bare Hands.”

I was going to stay away from well-publicized stories in these weekly Newsroom posts. My modest blog is not meant to be a place for breaking news, and I usually don’t have much to add if a zillion other blogs have broached the same topic. I also don’t want each of these weekly posts to descend into rants, but I can’t stop myself this time. I’m livid with rage and I hope most other moms are as well.

This was a disgusting crime that was publicized through sub-par media coverage. The rapists have received support in their own community because of how this may ruin their lives. Let their lives be ruined. The reactions to the incident did not jump from sorrow for the girl and her family to complicated questions about how this could have happened. No, they started with “she was a willing participant” (She was physically threatened and forced to have sex, so I suppose we have different definitions of “willing”) and “Where was her mother?” and “What was her mother thinking?”  and “How can you have an 11-year-old child missing down in the Quarters?” Those last few quotes were from the mentioned NYT article and by a Ms. Harrison. The Times reporter was obviously not the one speaking, but by deciding to include these quotes as the first opinions in the article, he was making a judgment on what source material should be valued, and this is why the NYT recently issued a statement about imbalanced reporting. It was imbalanced and it only took 40,000 petitioners to make them see that.

As a country, we obviously aren’t good at talking about sexual assault, and I don’t think we are any better at talking about race. However, this particular story isn’t about race.The history of racial violence, the stereotypes against black men, the image of the non-white seductress are still disgracefully simmering in our culture. I understand that. However, instead of taking this moment to talk about violence against women, many took this moment to talk about prejudice against black men. That is shameful. I completely agree with a recent Jezebel post about the issue of race and rape: “Even in the most heinous of circumstances, people are managing to redefine who the true victim is.”

I understand the need to analyze social tragedies. I understand race and gender issues all play roles in many complicated situations, BUT this situation isn’t a complicated warning about race in America, or about poverty in America, or about single motherhood in America, or about the sexualization of young girls in America. It is a decidedly uncomplicated story about violence against women. Women are not valued as highly as men are. There. I said it.

What do I mean by “women are not valued as highly as men are”? I don’t mean that all men devalue women or that everybody is to blame for this devaluation or that men don’t also occasionally get the short end of the stick in public discourse or that men are even the ones doing most of the devaluing. I do mean that a huge subtext of reporting about rape and sexual assault against women is that the women somehow brought this upon themselves or that they are exaggerating (e.g. the Lara Logan story) or that their standards of behavior somehow account for the violent actions of the men around them or that mothers are supposed to be the ultimate guardians of morality and what should we expect from young men anyway?

The reaction to this gang rape is an extreme example of this pothole in public discussion about gendered violence, but it is not the only. Has anyone wondered why all the conversations about Charlie Sheen only brush on his history of domestic violence? It’s like this part of his screwed up story is an add on because he’s only abusing bimbos. Something is very wrong about the way the media has talked about him.

This value problem isn’t limited to poor, minority, racially charged communities. Rich frat boys can also devalue women or make light of rape. Check out this confiscated email (proven to be real) from a USC frat. Women are supposed temptresses, even the youngest of us. Women, even when the victim, are somehow still the cause of their own victimization. This story of victim blaming is so old I want to scream at the inability of journalists and community members and commenters to get it. Yes, I would have killed those guys with my bare hands (and to state the obvious, no, I don’t think murder is actually in my constitution), but in writing this I now realize my anger isn’t only directed at the rapists. I’m angry that in 2011 we can turn an 11 year old girl or an 18 year old woman or a 38 year old woman or an 88 year old woman into the cause of her own disgusting victimization.

As you might have noticed by the title of this “Newsroom” post, it was written in rage. This happens to me sometimes. Okay, a lot. While listening to news or morning television (back when I used to watch television) a seemingly boring story will suddenly take an outlandish turn, sending me into a back-talking tizzy. When I watched television, the most common recipient of my rage was The Today Show. This morning it was a back episode of NPR’s Talk of the Nation.

I love NPR. I call (Over)Thinking Mom MPR as an homage, for goodness sake, but the episode “Have We Grown Too Fond of Technology” just serves to reinforce absolutely ridiculous, stupid, sexist, unsupported, insert angry adjective here, notion that mothers, especially nursing mothers, can make or break their new babies. I’ll back up before getting to my specific rant and look at the most common point of guilt, which is nursing itself, or the lack thereof. I’m a huge fan of breastfeeding and did a podcast episode called The Case Against the Case Against Breastfeeding (in support of breastfeeding if you are confused), so I’m not impartial, but let’s agree that moms who start with formula are not by nature bad mothers.

Okay, so what if you nurse? Society should hail you as earth momma right? Of course not. The nursing mother can still supposedly harm her child by eating the wrong foods. Here’s the truth: Gassy foods don’t make a baby gassy, and only a small minority, a very small minority, have allergies to things like wheat or dairy, so back off our diet. We can eat what we want (other than maybe a generally unhealthy assortment of processed foods, but those things hurt us all).

But now another way for the nursing mother to screw up her kid has materialized. According to Professor Sherry Turkle who wrote the new book Alone Together, nursing mothers, like other degenerates (my term, not hers) of my generation and younger, are unable to disconnect from technology at crucial moments. For example, parents shouldn’t text at the dinner table or text at the playground or while reading a book to their kids. I nodded in agreement as she listed all these technology no-nos, but then she pulled out the big one, the one at which we as listeners were supposed to be aghast: Nursing mothers also text WHILE BREASTFEEDING! Can you believe this?!, so goes the sentiment of Turkle and the host. At a moment that is supposed to be full of primal bonding, mothers are distracted by technology.

Are you kidding me Turkle?! I don’t text. I don’t have a smartphone and have never mastered this form of communication, but if I saw a mother texting while nursing her baby, I wouldn’t think anything of it. Some mothers read books or their kindle, others watch television, or, in my case, listen to podcasts. Has Turkle nursed a newborn? If she has, does she remember how long it can take or how often you must stop what you are doing to feed your baby? Nursing is beautiful and lovely and much of the time I did and do nothing else but cuddle with my baby when feeding her, BUT moms are allowed to multitask. In fact, moms are usually lauded for their ability to multitask. However, if they are multitasking in the pursuit of communication or education or even amusement, this is deemed inappropriate.

And no, Turkle cannot prove texting while nursing will screw up a kid, which is the problem of most of these technology phobic books. They make grand arguments that are actually really old. But I don’t want to get into a close-reading of Luddites, especially because I know I have some Luddite blood flowing through me. I’ll end with my beginning: Nursing mothers will NOT screw up their babies by texting or reading or doing anything else for their amusement while feeding their infants!

Rant over.

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I’m getting all sciencey in this week’s “Newsroom” post. Ever since I read The Emperor of All Maladies and did the podcast episode on smoking, I’ve been intrigued by what science says about questionable outgrowths of modern culture and industry versus what the peddlers of these products say. Scientists identified tobacco as a carcinogen long before the tobacco industry even hinted at admission. I’m getting the sense that the same thing is happening with pesticides.

I’m not a huge fan of conspiracy theories or the notion that big business = bad while earthy crunchy health nut = good. However, the more I read, the more I want to dish out the big bucks for organic pesticide free produce and products. I don’t always do it. 9 dollars for organic strawberries versus 5 for the pesticide kind usually means I happily gobble the chemicals, but Scientific American just published another article reminding me why I should get my head out of the pesticide strewn sand.

A little over a week ago they published an article called “Pesticides May Block Male Hormones.” After testing many agricultural pesticides, British scientists from the University of London’s Centre for Toxicology concluded that “systematic testing for anti-androgenic activity of currently used pesticides is urgently required.” More specifically, they found that 30 out of 37 widely used pesticides in developed countries blocked or mimicked male hormones, which as far as I can tell is a bad thing. The EPA recently expanded its Endrocine Disruptor Screening Program, much to the chagrin of the pesticide industry, but none of the 16 pesticides that the Brits tested are even included in the EPA’s program, which signals that a whole lot of pesticides are in use that haven’t been adequately tested. As far as I’m concerned, pesticides should be one of those things tested before not after they enter the food chain.

I won’t go into all the science mumbo jumbo of the article, but will summarize to say the most potent pesticides were insecticides used on orchard fruits, grains, rice, and veggies and that those most at risk are babies in utero or nursing. So all you pregnant and nursing mammas, watch what you eat!

What does the pesticide industry say? That the EPA should refrain from listing more chemicals for testing “until the agency has had an opportunity to evaluate the performance” of the techniques used to test. Basically, let us evaluate your testing to waste time so you do less testing. In my unscientific layperson opinion, it appears as if more testing is bad for the pesticide industry because testing reveals problems.

Their other counter-argument is that even if lab results show a connection between pesticides and interference with reproductive hormones, this doesn’t mean the pesticides are harming human reproduction. This argument is odd to me. Even if this is a possibility, albeit an unlikely one, let’s test to find out, okay? A lot of smart scientists think this is a “matter of urgency.” Testing is expensive, but I imagine the long term health effects and the decline of male fertility, not to mention the ethical problems of creating a product that can harm those it is meant to feed, warrant spending the money on this kind of research. In the meantime, I’ll buy organic as much as I can and will gladly eat the tiny overpriced strawberries.

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Image: anankkml / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

I’m sure most of you are familiar with the horrible attack on the reporter Lara Logan in Egypt last week. In case you missed this news, a quick recap: Logan, a 39 year old mother of two and seasoned reporter, was in Cairo reporting on the latest uprisings. She was reporting for the show 60 Minutes and had a camera crew with her. At one point, while separated from her crew and security, she was surrounded by a group of Egyptian men who beat and sexually assaulted her for 20 or 30 minutes. A group of women and around 20 Egyptian soldiers eventually rescued her.

The reaction to this horrible incident by many anonymous online commenters and some not so anonymous public personalities has been shocking. The reactions range from people blaming her for going into harm’s way to others suggesting she’s a bad mother. As Strollerderby notes, news companies like NPR and the LA Times actually had to remove some comments from their websites because the comments violated their terms of service. In other words, they were too cruel. Strollerderby looked to TMZ to find some disturbing comments that hadn’t been removed. Here’s one they quote:

“She’s [expletive] nuts as a mother to put herself with her inflated ego into such harm’s way. I don’t respect her. In fact I think she’s a reckless bad mother.”

Here’s another:

“So this was blown out of proportion…. She ran off for a night of fun…. She’s coming back for more…. Wow.”

Those are bad enough and what we might expect from online commenters. Read any site that receives high traffic and you’re sure to find insensitive virtual cowards, but did you hear about the journalist Nir Rosen, a fellow (now former) of NYU.

This guy has written for Time, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. He also has written a couple books about the Iraq War, so, in other words, he’s a real journalist. He claims he wrote these tweets before knowing the full extent of the attack. I’m not sure why this matters. He knows its dangerous over there and when the news started reporting an attack, what did he think, that she stubbed her toe? Jerk.

Rosen tried to delete his tweets upon realizing the severity of the assault, but he forgot nothing is ever really lost on the Internet. You can see the change in his attitude as he starts to receive criticism for his comments and then finally realizes his job is on the line. Note: The reference to McChrystal has to do with Logan criticizing the author of a Rolling Stone piece who printed remarks McChrystal made about the President, which eventually resulted in him being relieved of his command. This is what he tweeted, as reported by Forbes:

“lara logan had to outdo anderson. where was her buddy mccrystal?”

“she was probably just groped like thousands of other women.”

“jesus christ, at a moment when she is going to become a martyr and glorified we should at least remember her role as a major war monger”

“ah [expletive] it, i apologize for being insensitive, its always wrong, thats obvious, but i’m rolling my eyes at all the attention she will get”

“and as a result of that i hope people remember her role glorifying war and condemning rolling stone’s hastings while defending mcchrystal”

“As someone who’s devoted his career to defending victims and supporting justice, I’m very ashamed for my insensitive and offensive comments”

“on the job you get used to making jokes about our own death, other people’s deaths, horrors, you forget that you sound like a [kinda expletive] at home”

“to the 500 people new twitter followers and the old ones. I did not mean it and i apologize again. it was an inappropriate unaccetable joke”

But his apology was too late for the twitter world. Under pressure from NYU, he resigned his fellowship. I’m not sure which tweet was the unacceptable joke to which he refers. And I’m not sure he realizes that he sounds like a jerk (not the word he used) at home AND among his peers. This isn’t a case of we the general public just can’t understand the black humor of a journalist. No Rosen, we get it, but I’m not sure you do.

Maybe twitter has made us more callous as a culture because we can respond publicly to something without knowing the facts, or, maybe, and more likely, Rosen is like a lot of other people, who upon hearing about violence against women, first question, then criticize, then blame, all the while forgetting that none of those are a good first reaction, whether you know the specific details of the assault or not. Rosen, stupid is as stupid tweets.

I recently came across a CBS News fluff piece called “Why Do Women Feel Colder Than Men?” Since I’m always turning up the thermostat, have been told by others that “I feel dead,” and have had my thyroid checked multiple times to see what is up with my circulation, all while Dave trots around in shorts and a t-shirt during a snow storm, not that we get a lot of those in San Diego, I clicked on the article’s link. Tell me CBS Doctor correspondent woman, why am I so cold?

Dr. Jennifer Ashton says we shiver while men sweat because women conserve more heat around core organs, providing less energy for overall circulation.  The CBS Doc also says women suffer more frequently than men do from ailments like anemia and under-active or low functioning thyroid. I’ve had my blood count and thyroid checked within the last year, and this feeling dead problem has been happening for most of my life, so I suspect my internal organs are nice and toasty while my toes turn into blocks of ice in 80 degree weather. I also think the generally smaller size of women has something to do with this. I’m no doctor, but I find it odd this wasn’t mentioned.

According to the news report, women shouldn’t feel too bad about their frosty constitutions. As soon as I heard the reporter utter this phrase, I wanted to scream “No! Don’t do it. Don’t tell us being cold burns calories. Please, not another fluff piece on women’s bodies that somehow ends with the topic of weight loss!”

But it was too late. My nonverbal scream wasn’t heard. The Doctor reports that new research suggests if we are exposed to slightly colder temperatures, like 63 degrees (freezing to me) we can stimulate the production of something called brown fat, what babies have as a keep warm substitute for shivering. Brown fat will somehow help us burn more calories and thus is a “silver lining” to the news report. Yuck. I’m sure there are some desperate to be skinny women sitting in an igloo as I write.

Image: Evgeni Dinev / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

In case you haven’t heard, the world’s oldest living person just died. According to the New York Daily News (and about a zillion other newspapers), Eunice Sanborn died Monday, Jan. 31st in her home of Jacksonville, Texas. She was born on July 20, 1896 (probably; some family members insist she was born in 1895).

The death of Sanborn got me thinking about the possibility that I have given birth to the future oldest living person, a.k.a Amelia. It could happen. She’s a woman and women tend to live longer. She’s stubborn as well. Sure, no one in my family has lived that long and genetics seems to play the most important role in extreme longevity, but did I mention she is stubborn?

If Amelia lives to 115, which is low balling it because life expectancy keeps increasing, she will die in 2125. If we don’t have flying cars and ubiquitous hover boards by then I’ll be severely disappointed, but I suppose I’ll be too dead to be bummed about the absent hover boards.

I can’t imagine 115 years into the future, but I can peek back to 1896. The historian in me gets a real kick out of envisioning what the world was like for the former oldest living person’s mother.

• As Eunice’s mother hobbles towards her third trimester, the first modern Olympics are held in Greece. And no, she doesn’t watch them on television.
• The month before Eunice is born an earthquake and tsunami kills 27,000 people in Japan. On a happier note, the first US movie theatre also opens.
• As Eunice cries her newborn wail, F. Scott Fitzgerald joins her generation in September. A woman who died only a few days ago was older than Fitzgerald! Perhaps Fitz should have followed Eunice’s clean living advice if he had wanted to see past middle age.
• As Eunice nears four months old, William McKinley beats out William Jennings Bryan for the presidency. That’s right. Eunice lived from President McKinley to President Obama. This is amazing when you note 1896 was also the year of Plessy Vs. Ferguson. Put your high school thinking caps on to remember that this was the Supreme Court case that decided segregation was constitutional.

Oh, and this was the year of the first car accident, and it was in NYC. Of course. Crazy drivers.

It’s time for another mommy blogger spotlight round-up. If you are new, I highlight a different mommy blog in almost every podcast. As I said in the last spotlight, although the term “Mommy Blogger” is not without its controversy, I’ve stuck with it in a co-opting the enemy’s phrase kind of way (in other words, I’m sick of the term as a slight and want to use it as a compliment). If the term “Mommy Blogger” offends you, pretend like its a “Moms who write stuff I read and like” spotlight; as you can hear, that term is like peanut butter on the tongue; it doesn’t roll off very easily.

Here is a rundown of the most recent spotlighted blogs and the episodes in which they appear.

1. Mammalingo: I love Mammalingo so much I’ve submitted two words to their online mommy glossary. This isn’t the typical mommy blog, but rather “an online dictionary with made-up words about parenting and other things I feel like writing about.”  The “I” in that statement is Melissa, the brains behind the super clever operation. I’m a wannabe wordie (like a foodie for words) and as you can tell, I like to make up words, so Mammalingo is a perfect non-guilty linguistic pleasure. For my first submission, I made up a word when another reader had a definition without its referent. For your vocab pleasure, I present “Kidfusion.” It’s when you accidentally watch the wrong kid at a playground. I made up another word, “Reating.” Oh, and did I mention that Melissa recently guest posted for The New York Time‘s Parenting Blog, aka Motherlode, a previous Mommy Blogger Spotlight.  You know a blog is good when you get to guest post for The NYT. Go Melissa. [Highlighted in Podcast Episode 16: He Said/She Said: Your Post Baby Marriage Part II]

2. Snarky in the Suburbs: Snarky’s format is simple. She uses a clean wordpress.com theme and doesn’t include pictures. She posts approximately once a week, usually about happenings in her life. So why is her blog superior to other mommy blogs? She is a hilarious, insightful, gifted writer. I’m completely jealous of her posts and if I’m jealous of a mommy blog, I know it must be good. Her attitude is often caustic, without being mean. She is self-deprecating, without being pathetic. I don’t say this often, but someone needs to give her a book deal and I’ll be first in the Amazon line. For a taste of her writing, read one of my favorite posts: “My Crappy Old Year” [Highlighted in Podcast Episode 17: Periodicals, not Pilgrims]

3. Rookie Moms:  At my surprise baby shower, someone gave me The Rookie Moms Handbook: 250 Activities to Do With (and Without) Your Baby . I liked it a lot, so I looked up their blog, and, it turns out, I like that a lot too. Heather and Whitney, the Rookie Moms, have an online voice that I dig, but I also appreciate the blog’s usefulness. They include a lot of posts about different activities to do with your baby and even have a place to browse activities by your child’s age, a helpful tool for someone like me who stares at a four month old and wonders “What do I do?” I like the blog so much, I submitted a guest post and they actually published it.  Yay!  Check it out: “One Rookie Mom’s Five Favorite Baby Items.” No, I don’t select Mommy Blogger Spotlights based on who will publish my stuff.  I swear I submitted the guest posts after choosing the spotlight.  Honestly.  Plus, I only submit to blogs I really like and admire. [Highlighted in Podcast Episode 18: Body After Baby]

4. Ramble Ramble: I don’t know how I found Ramble Ramble, but I started reading it because I really liked its header made to look like a candy bar. I realize this says a lot about my sugar addiction. It’s hard to classify Ginger, the Rambler’s, post style. Some are about her life, others are lists, others are photographs, and still others invite comments. I suppose this is why the blog’s title makes perfect sense. I like Ginger’s tone and I appreciate that she’s honest. Check out her recent short, but controversial, post about women who complain about their husbands in the virtual world: “You Married Him.” [Highlighted in Podcast Episode 19: Childcare and the Working Mom]

5. Enjoying the Small Things: I read a lot of mommy blogs, but it’s extremely rare that a particular blog post will make me tear up. When I clicked on this popular blog by Kelle Hampton, I was immediately about to click away because some music started playing and this happens to be one of my blog pet peeves, but the pictures were so arresting, making me stick around. I’m so glad I did. I read the birth story of her daughter Nella Cordelia who has Down Syndrome, something they discovered the day of her birth. Kelle has a real gift for narrative and photography, so the combination makes for some beautiful real life storytelling. Her daughter Nella just turned one and I’m amazed by the pictures of the party. I will not be throwing something that nice for Amelia, not because I don’t want to, but because I don’t even know how a mom does something like that. Amazing. [Highlighted in Podcast Episode 20: Meet Mrs. Claus]

6. Cool Mom Picks: This is the blog I check whenever I want to window shop for unique baby items I probably won’t ever buy. Believe me, I want to buy them, but its hard to justify a personalized blanket for Amelia when her grandparents already got her a personalized basket, rocking chair, and bookends, but check out this post to see a super cute elephant blanket. The blanket is made my a mom run business that donates some of its profits. Hmmm. Maybe I could buy it if we reorganized our finances a little. Yes, I’m convinced Amelia absolutely needs this blanket. I want it! I want it! That was just another Cool Mom Picks internet tantrum caused by finding awesome stuff I can’t afford. And yet I will continue to subscribe to this blog because the finds really are that cool. [Highlighted in Podcast Episode 21: Adventures of a Stay at Home Mom]

7. Mommy Shorts: I like this blog because it is eclectic. The author, Ilana, writes about her life, but she also posts funny tweets from others, bios of babies, and my favorite–the Ask Dr. B series. Her sister, aka Dr. B, has a doctorate in early childhood development and answers reader questions. A lot of mommy blogs spout off advice and no, I don’t think you need a doctorate to give good advice, but sometimes its nice to get an expert opinion. Check out one of the recent Dr. B posts. [Highlighted in Podcast Episode 22: Modern Day Wet Nursing: Weird or Wonderful?]

8. Parent Hacks: Dave hates this blog because it is the root of more projects for him. This means I love this blog because it creates more fun projects! Parent Hacks is the brainchild of Asha Dornfest who has created a place for parents to share tips. These tips can range from repurposing an outgrown dress into a pencil case or  making a bookshelf into a toy shelf.  That last tip is actually mine, one I submitted to Parent Hacks (yes, I know it feels like I submit a million things to other blogs, but I couldn’t stop myself. This blog is so cool.) [Highlighted in Podcast Episode 24: Early Childcare from the Provider's Perspective]

I’m always looking for more fun mommy blogs, so if you have any suggestions, feel free to contact me.  Happy reading.

I’m going to use this week’s Newsroom post as a forum for talking about the way we (okay, I) consume online media, whether this media be blogs, newspapers, or podcasts. If you are new to this whole internet media consumption thing and find yourself bookmarking every blog or newspaper you read online, you may want to reconsider your virtual time management. If the term RSS makes your head hurt, believe me, it’s actually easy peasy.  If you are a seasoned blog reader, you may not need the following information, so this is for the rest of you. Oh, and for the sake of disclosure, I’m almost thirty and didn’t know how to do most of this stuff until maybe six months ago.

I.  Why RSS Rocks

You see that little red button in my sidebar that looks like this:  This is the universal symbol for RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication. I’m sure you’ve seen these buttons before, but if you didn’t know what would happen if you clicked on it, I’ll explain now. Actually, click on it and see where it takes you. You should be taken to a page that says “How to Subscribe,” so go ahead and click on the first “RSS” you see.  Now, you will see a screen that asks if you would like to add (Over)Thinking Mom to a web-based podcatcher (In this case, (Over)Thinking Mom is called a podcast, but both the blog posts and podcast episodes are included in the RSS subscription).  If you already have a Gmail account, click on the Google link now. I’ll wait.

You should see an option to add my blog to Google (or to Yahoo and other stuff I haven’t heard of. I happen to have a personal Gmail email address, so prefer Google). Google Reader is simply a list of all the serialized material that you read through RSS. In Google Reader, the names of your subscribed blogs will be on the left and on the right you can scroll through the content of each individual blog. For example, (Over)Thinking Mom’s RSS provides the beginnings of posts, so as you scroll through a list of my most recent posts, you can click on any title that sounds interesting and you’ll be taken to the (Over)Thinking Mom website.

Why bother with a reader? Well, maybe you don’t read a ton of blogs, but do you read other serialized content, such as a newspaper like The New York Times or an online magazine like Slate? Going to your browser bookmarks and checking out those sites everyday can be time consuming, but an online reader will consolidate all this material. Clear out most of your browser bookmarks and put a link to Google Reader there instead.

I read a lot of mommy blogs as well as online newspapers. To get a glimpse into my odd reading habits, my RSS reader includes Balboa Park Beat, Parent Hacks,  and The Atlantic, a weird combo that is easy to check in less than one minute. Any time you visit a site with content that has an RSS symbol, you can add it to your reader. And if you visit a site with content to which you’d like to subscribe but can’t find the RSS symbol, you can put the web address into the reader and it will search for one. Pretty awesome, right?

II.  Subscribing Via Email

Although I prefer RSS as a one click easy subscription option, you can still subscribe to many blogs via email. You may have noticed when you clicked on my red RSS button that subscribing by email is an option. This means you’ll receive an email every time new content is created. This is fine if you check your email a lot, but can cause inbox clutter. Plus, you have to be sure to verify your subscription to get any of the content (and sometimes a feedburner issue can prevent this verification).

I myself am not a huge fan of receiving daily emails from blogs, which is why I prefer RSS.  That way, I choose when to check the content and am not bombarded with emails.  Also, if I like a website and I’m afraid of forgetting about it, I can subscribe to the RSS without committing to a deluge of inbox reminders. That said, I’ve recently set up a new option in the (Over)Thinking Mom email subscription service. However, this service only sends you one email a week that includes all that week’s posts.  Even after my RSS reader hype, if you know you’ll never use one, but don’t want to get email every day, this weekly email is a nice alternative.

III.  Subscribing to the Podcast

If you subscribe via RSS or via email, the podcast post will automatically be sent to you with an embedded player. Most of the time, hitting play is fine, but if you find the show is cutting in and out, blame your internet connection. If this happens, you can download the episode, even saving to your computer if you right click on the podcast download link at the bottom of the podcast posts. If you don’t want to save the show to your computer, but would like to listen in a different window so that you can still surf the web, press the “play now” button in the sidebar or click once on the download option.

However, my favorite listening option is through iTunes. Even if you don’t have an iPod, you can still download iTunes and listen on your computer. And if you don’t have an iPod, beg your loved ones for its awesomeness. I subscribe to many podcasts via iTunes and listen to them on my laptop while I clean or while I play with Amelia (NPR is soothing).  I also sync my iPod every few days so that I can listen to the latest podcasts in the car. In my fantasy world, I even create an (Over)Thinking Mom app for all of you with smart phones, but right now that is still fantasy. [Update 2/15/2010: This is no longer a fantasy. The show is now part of Stitcher, a free application for your iPhone, Blackberry, Android, and Pre. Download to your phone and it automatically updates with new podcast episodes! Check out my Stitcher page HERE.]

Although downloading Stitcher is easiest, you can still listen in other ways on your smartphone! How? Let’s start with the iPhone. Simply sync your phone with iTunes, as you would an iPod. Do have an Android? No problem. First, download the Google Listen app. Then, click on “my subscriptions.” Next, click on “add subscription.” Finally, type in the url http://feeds.feedburner.com/overthinkingmompodcast. I realize this is a bit of work, but you only need to do it once and you’ll have the podcast automatically delivered to your phone. Now you can listen on the go without needing to buy an iPod.  You can do the same with a Blackberry, but with a different app. You’ll need to download the Blackberry Podcast App and manually add the url http://feeds.feedburner.com/overthinkingmompodcast.

I know many of you aren’t active podcast listeners. I’m looking at you, mom. When I visited my mom after I first started the podcast, I asked if she had listened to the most recent episode. She said she hadn’t found the time, but would listen right away. I watched her open my laptop, hit the play button in the sidebar and then just stare at the computer screen. Say what? This was definitely a generational divide. I would get so bored if I stared at nothing while listening to an episode. How many people turn on their favorite radio program and then sit and stare at the wall? I love the rapt attention, but podcasts are meant to be consumed as you do other things, so by all means clean the bathroom or pay bills or make dinner or drive your kid to daycare while you listen to my oh so glorious voice go on and on about something or other.

I hope this post has helped explain some terms. If you still have questions, please email me or write a comment below. Again, all this information may have been obvious to some, but if my mom and dad have learned anything, then the super long post was worth it.

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If you haven’t heard, the internet is a buzz with discussion about Amy Chua’s article in the WSJ called “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior.” All of the attention hoisted on an article with an already bad name made me want to not read it as fast as I can.  But I couldn’t resist and it is great in a I can’t believe she wrote that kind of way.  I highly recommend taking the time to read it if you want to feel better about your mothering skills, which I’m not sure was the intention of Amy Chua.  Maybe it is more tongue and cheek than I can see.  Probably not.

Anyway, the main point of the article is that Chinese mothers bully and shame their children into perfection, while Western (presumably American) mothers are too concerned with self-esteem and individuality, thus allowing their children to never reach their full potential and therefore causing them to fall short of the actual self-esteem they deserve.  Like a lot of popular articles, this one is a prelude to a book release, causing it to be short on facts and long on bold statements to sell copies and get links (yes, I’m providing that link as well.  Your welcome WSJ and Amy Chua).

This is an endlessly quotable article, so the best way to capture it’s tone is through the best lines.  I quote below:

“The fact is that Chinese parents can do things that would seem unimaginable—even legally actionable—to Westerners. Chinese mothers can say to their daughters, “Hey fatty—lose some weight.” By contrast, Western parents have to tiptoe around the issue, talking in terms of “health” and never ever mentioning the f-word, and their kids still end up in therapy for eating disorders and negative self-image.”

“Chinese parents can order their kids to get straight As. Western parents can only ask their kids to try their best. Chinese parents can say, You’re lazy. All your classmates are getting ahead of you. By contrast, Western parents have to struggle with their own conflicted feelings about achievement, and try to persuade themselves that they’re not disappointed about how their kids turned out.”

“For example, if a child comes home with an A-minus on a test, a Western parent will most likely praise the child. The Chinese mother will gasp in horror and ask what went wrong.”

“Chinese parents demand perfect grades because they believe that their child can get them. If their child doesn’t get them, the Chinese parent assumes it’s because the child didn’t work hard enough.”

Chua’s definition of the word “superior” is purely results based.  If your child gets an A, you are a good mother.  If your child doesn’t, you care too much about coddling and have done your child a disservice by not forcing that A.  Sure, I understand that some parents, Western or not, place low expectations on their children, non-expectations that create a trend of underachievement.  However, obviously high expectations can come without bullying.  I think I got a B once in my life.  Actually, I’m not sure if I did.  I can’t remember the class, so either I never got a B rather than an A or the event was so traumatic I have blocked it out.  Either way, plenty of Western kids excel at school without the “Chinese” approach, a point that lessens the impact of Chua’s argument on the results end.  If results can be achieved in an empathetic non-pressure cooker environment, her argument starts to unravel.  Maybe bullying isn’t a necessary part of the equation.

Overall, I’m not all that interested in the results part of her “superior” argument.  She seems to believe that Western mothers spend their days fretting about self-esteem at the detriment of achievement, as if one precludes the other.  She also says kids can’t enjoy something until they reach a level of competence and that this competence comes as a result of pressure by parents, specifically mothers.  Western mothers let their kids give up too easily.

I quit the piano when I was 12, rather dramatically.  I simply didn’t want to play anymore.  My mom didn’t force the issue (I have a strong personality).  On some days I have fleeting regrets about giving up so soon, but most days I don’t care a bit.  Not at all.  As a friend pointed out a few years back, I have freakishly small hands.  I was never going to be a concert pianist.  I never ever wanted to be a concert pianist.  According to Chua, my mother should have forced it.  Made me practice.  Shown me what I could accomplish.  Maybe.  Maybe I would have mastered “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,” politely exuberant at my accomplishments.  Or maybe I needed to ditch the piano so I could stick my head in novels or scribble in my journal or, you know, use my imagination.

Some critics of Chua say that what America has is personal freedom.  Steph Thompson recently critiqued Chua’s article in a Babble piece called “Is Child Happiness Part of Child Development?” Thompson ends her piece by saying “So, while I think Ms. Chua is dead on with her parents-as-productivity-drivers and how to build a ‘successful’ society model, I don’t want to live in her America. No offense, but I want kids to come to things on their own, without shame.  We need to learn to enjoy the journey, to teach our kids to find pleasure in their pursuits, to live freely and even, sometimes, lazily.”

While I agree with Thompson’s general sentiment, I don’t find Chua’s conclusions unconvincing because they take away children’s personal freedoms.  I find them unconvincing because they aren’t as logical and productivity oriented as Chua assumes.  Sure, a child can get an A in every single class and master the piano and violin, but what does this mean in terms of innovation, individual or cultural?

Forget the whole self-esteem sidebar as well.  That stereotypical Asian versus Western juxtaposition no longer interests me.  Life is not measured by outward success alone.  Personal happiness is part of the success equation.  Duh.  Rather, I don’t buy rote practice and performance as the only necessary steps to achieve personal or national fulfillment.  Maybe that class in which you got an A was pretty useless.  Maybe the teacher was an idiot.  Maybe another kid got a C because he/she was looking at things in a truly unique and innovative way and that kid will grow up to be the most successful whatever you want to call it in the world because he/she found a new way of looking at problems.   And maybe the “superior” mother who was calling her daughter a fatty and making her practice against her will now has a thin and accomplished daughter even as the fat, former C student is running the world.  Perhaps I am getting ahead of myself.  I now need to congratualte Amelia for spitting up and chewing her foot.  You know, I don’t want to hurt her self-esteem.

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Women have been chastised for lowering fertility rates because of their penchant for birth control and delayed procreation.  However, a new article in The Daily Beast by Heather Turgeon reminds us that men have something to do with baby making and if the baby ain’t being made it could be a result of Judd Apatow, or something like that.

According to the article “Low Sperm Count:  Why Male Fertility is Falling,” one in five men age 18-25 is sub-fertile.  I’m not sure what “sub-fertile” means, but it doesn’t sound good.  Why is sperm quality decreasing in developed countries?  Judd Apatow!  Okay, maybe Apatow isn’t the culprit but his celebration of pot-smoking, heavy drinking men who never grow up showcases a real sperm predicament, which is funny because his movies are often celebrations of male genitalia.

Turgeon explains, “Findings this year have shown that a man’s lifestyle—the choices he makes—could have an impact on his sperm, and in turn, the health of his future child. That’s a revolutionary idea, because we tend to see men’s sperm as either working or not working and assume that the story ends there.”  Of course, the story doesn’t end there.  Everyday toxins combined with day-to-day habits can affect future baby making.  This makes sense and I wonder why it took so long for the medical establishment to look at male lifestyle trends.

In some ways, this finding feels painfully obvious.  Smoking, heavy drinking, etc.. can hurt sperm, not just the oft mentioned hot tub and jockey shorts.  However, recently Hugh Hefner talked about the possibility of fathering a child with his 24 year old fiance.  Hugh Hefner!  He is 84 years old.  Does he think he has magic sperm?  Hefner’s delusion is a product of our own culture’s assumption infertility is mostly a woman’s problem and that all men have to do is show up, either at 24 or at 84.

Smoking and unhealthy living are unsurprising fertility influencers, but recent studies have focused on dangers in our environment.  For example, Turgeon notes that “researchers from Harvard and Michigan Schools of Public Heath, along with the CDC, reported a relationship between bisphenol-A (BPA) and sperm counts. BPA, found in hard plastic items like food containers, could tinker with reproduction because it’s an estrogen-like ‘endocrine disruptor’.”  This study specifically reveals that men with the highest levels of BPA in their urine had sperm concentrations 23 percent lower than those with the lowest exposure.  Additionally, “a study of Chinese factory workers also found that, on average, those with the highest exposure to BPA had the lowest sperm counts.”

That’s a little scary, not because of the numbers themselves–the threat to sperm shouldn’t be overstated as an epidemic–but because the link between BPA and sperm count seems strong, suggesting environmental toxins are slowly vacuuming up our baby dust.  Overall, men might want to consider how their lifestyle and environment may be affecting their chances of conceiving.  Not all infertile men are chain smoking drunks who eat only from BPA laced plastics, but a little public awareness for the wannabe fathers out there couldn’t hurt.

Don’t forget to subscribe by RSS or Email to all the (Over)Thinking Mom posts.   Are you afraid of commitment?  That’s okay.  You can subscribe to each portion of the blogcast separately.  Check out by RSS or Email the once a week “Newsroom” post.  Oh, and I have a facebook page where I post the best stuff.  Just click like in the left sidebar to stay up to date.

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Forbes magazine recently rounded up the “Ten Worst New Year’s Resolutions for Your Wallet.” Among the list, don’t resolve to join a gym (obvious financial drain) and don’t resolve to stop using credit cards (a less obvious financial no-no, but they say use them selectively rather than cut them up).  Forbes‘ list is fine, but a little disconnected from my own mommy life.  It got me thinking about the “Five Worst New Year’s Resolutions for Your Mommy Health.” (I tried to think of ten, but my tired mommy brain pooped out at five).

This topic is especially apt because I’m completely exhausted and drained due to our New Year’s Eve outing.  Dave and I stayed out until 11:30pm, opting to leave a fun party before midnight because we 1) wanted to avoid crazy drunks on the road and 2) were so so tired and dreaming of ringing in 2011 in our pajamas.  We are old and were the first to leave the party, but to my knowledge also the only parents there.  This leads me to bad New Year’s resolution number one.

1)  Don’t resolve to get out more.  It may sound like a good idea and by all means jump at truly rad opportunities that come your way, but don’t try to convince yourself you need to party like its 1999.

2)  Don’t resolve to sleep more.  Amelia amazingly slept straight from 8:30pm to 5am last night, which would have been great if we had gone to bed before 12:30am.  This made me realize I can resolve all I want to sleep more, but my sleep is the Siamese twin of Amelia’s snoozing, which means I should instead resolve to get her to sleep more.

3)  Don’t resolve to exercise more or lose weight. This is an obvious bad resolution and a repeat from the Forbes list.  You are doomed to fail if you think about physical activity or body image in such vague terms.  A good mom alternative might be to resolve to take a walk with your baby/child everyday.

4)  Don’t resolve to organize your life. I have made this resolution a million times and no matter how many labels or bins I buy, I find something else cluttering up our home and life.  I could spend my whole day in a Sisyphean cleaning and organizing pursuit, always comparing myself to other neat freak moms, always failing at knowing exactly where to put everything.  My alternative is resolving to toss Amelia’s keepsakes in a labeled bin so I can feel like I’m archiving her life without expending too much precious energy.  Done and done.

5)  And finally, don’t resolve to be a better mother.  This is like bad resolution number 3, vague and a set up for failure because the term “better mother” is a psychological trap.  A better alternative than this better mother resolution is to pick one mothering goal.  For example, I resolve to keep boogieing down with Amelia every afternoon and in the process expose her to more music (and yes Justin Timberlake counts as music), a much less stressful marker of my parenting skills.  This also takes care of un-resolution number 3 without using the dirty word “exercise.”

Happy New Year!  Now, go nap with your baby or eat chocolate in your messy house while basking in your mothering imperfections.

Do you have any un-resolutions to add to the list? If so, let me know.

Don’t forget to subscribe by RSS or Email to all the (Over)Thinking Mom posts.   Are you afraid of commitment?  That’s okay.  You can subscribe to each portion of the blogcast separately.  Check out by RSS or Email the once a week “Newsroom” post.  Oh, and I have a facebook page where I post the best stuff.  Just click like in the left sidebar to stay up to date.

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I know a lot of moms have successfully branded themselves, but in terms of name and face recognition, not many can compete with the likes of Bethenny Frankel.  Sure, a lot of celebrities have babies and monetize their little ones, but Frankel has managed to create a new type of branded mommy, or so goes the implication of the Wall Street Journal article from November 24 called “As Seen on TV:  Brand Bethenny.” The tone of the article is not necessarily negative, but neither is it glowing, possibly reflecting the dual admiration and suspicion of people, especially moms, who sell the rights to their life as it is happening.

I believe Frankel has been more successful than most online branded mommies because of the sheer power of television, and when I say television, I mean reality programming.  As the WSJ articles states, “For reality television star Bethenny Frankel, life is a product.”  The article continues, “Currently filming two shows, preparing to publish her third book and putting the finishing touches on her lines of mixed drinks, skin-care products and shapewear, Ms. Frankel offers a glimpse of what it’s like when no corner of your world is private and everything belongs to the brand.”  This is the same observation many have made about the mommy blogging world, something I defended in Podcast Episode 7:  In Defense of the Mommy Blogger; however, I’m not a huge fan of Frankel.  Frankel’s success at turning her life into money is similar to that of a certain tier of mommy bloggers.  For example, Heather Armstrong at Dooce.com lives off the income of publicizing her life, but Armstrong doesn’t have a television presence, or, if she does it is minuscule compared to someone who has publicized her life via cable, not bandwidth.  If I’m a defender of the monetized mommy blog, why is Frankel not my branded mommy hero?  I’m not sure, maybe because crafting an online presence feels less obvious and annoying.  A follower of a mommy blog needs to commit to reading about another’s life, whereas any television viewer is bombarded with images of Frankel whether you like it or not.  You can turn off Bravo, but she’ll just pop up on The Today Show or Skating with the Stars (Sure, I don’t watch either of those, weakening my point, but she’s still appearing in places like the WSJ).

Ever since Frankel’s daughter Brynn was born a little over six months ago, she has been courted by advertisers, such as Proctor and Gamble, eager to tap into the purchasing power of the mom.  When Frankel was single and looking for love I imagine her marketing potential was tiny compared to her marketing role as the everymom.  We moms buy a ton of stuff.  The WSJ mentions that Frankel’s agent even has a “branded lifestyle” section.  The term “branded lifestyle” makes my skin crawl.  I suppose Frankel makes me uncomfortable because she has been courting fame for most of her adult life.  I get the feeling she’d support pretty much any brand that paid her enough, as would many mommy bloggers, to be fair, yet her entire life is structured around marketing, rather than marketing being tacked on to her life.

Despite my skin crawling at her “branded lifestyle,” I don’t dislike Frankel.  I’ll admit I watched The Real Housewives of NYC for a bit;  I’m a sucker for bad reality programming.  Out of all the characters, Frankel was the only one I liked, but I’m not enamored by her current mommy persona, perhaps because I caught her on The Today Show, one month after giving birth to her daughter and claiming losing the baby weight and getting back to your pre-pregnancy body is not as difficult as many women pretend (At another time, she said pregnancy was fairly easy and thought women exaggerated ).  When hearing this, my eyes rolled so much they almost got stuck.  Frankly Frankel, you don’t know what you are talking about.  I’ll watch you and your dysfunctional reality peers, but as soon as you start pretending you and your branded lifestyle is anything but extraordinary, my interest wanes.  I’m so bored with you, I’ll end this post now.

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I’m rebelling against my vitamin obsession.  Whilst pregnant I read too many books, all of which told me about the recent super vitamin in which I, and every other human being, is deficient.  Lately the go to vitamin has been D.  I’m sure you have heard the news that we must all shun sunscreen because every single person in the entire world is vitamin D deficient.  I’ve been left thoroughly confused.  I’m a worrier.  If sunscreen hinders vitamin D production, how can I simultaneously protect myself against skin cancer and against all the cancers resulting from a vitamin D deficiency?  In my confusion, I decided to stop taking anything but a multi-vitamin and keep my sunscreen, yet not be so OCD about applying it for walks around the neighborhood.

A couple months ago, I heard Dr. Bob Sears of the famous Sears family talk about improving the immune system of both adults and babies.  As he talked, I realized he was basically recommending we supplement ourselves like crazy.  I took notes on the proper amounts of vitamins, especially D, for babies.  I’m supposed to give Amelia drops of vitamin D every day (and I usually forget).  As Dr. Sears continued his talk, I started to mentally roll my eyes, which surprised me because I think he’s a smart guy and a good pediatrician, at least that is the image I get from his and his father’s books.  However, I couldn’t quite understand how it was evolutionary possible for all people to have such a severe deficiency in one vitamin.  Sears suggested California moms could become too complacent, thinking our year round sunshine (vitamin D is generated by exposure to the sun) would save us from needing to supplement.  Sears said all the sunshine in the world wouldn’t be able to raise our vitamin D levels adequately, but in the next breath he talked about how we should wear less sunscreen because it can block the sunshine necessary for vitamin D.  I was so confused by that logic.  If no amount of sunshine will help, why not just wear the sunscreen.

At the end of his talk, Dr. Sears accepted questions.  The health food store only sat maybe fifty or so people, meaning any question was likely to be answered.  I asked about this vitamin heavy method of improving immunity and if “we are just creating expensive pee?”  That question wasn’t meant to be condescending.  I have a cabinet full of vitamins.  I have a notebook somewhere full of all the dosages I need to take.  I’m not by nature a vitamin skeptic.  Sears answered that in a perfect world we would get all our nutrition from what we eat, but most of us don’t live in a perfect nutritional world.  I thought that was a good answer and is the main reason I still take vitamins at all.  But the vitamin D logic was still lost on me.  Doctors have been saying all the sun in the world, all the healthiest food options, will not raise our level of that vitamin to anywhere near an adequate level.  Sears even suggested we take more than the recommended dosage on the packages.  I left that health talk feeling that I had learned quite a bit, but not feeling convinced about vitamin D in particular.  I noticed that many of the moms treated Sears as the ultimate source of knowledge, probably because of his reputation and prolific writing career.  This bothered me.  Pediatricians are sources of information, and good sources at that, but no one doctor has all the answers.

This is all a big anecdotal build up for the vitamin D debunking in a November 29th New York Times article called “Report Questions Need for 2 Vitamin Supplements.” According to the article, “The very high levels of vitamin D that are often recommended by doctors and testing laboratories — and can be achieved only by taking supplements — are unnecessary and could be harmful, an expert committee says. It also concludes that calcium supplements are not needed.”  Great.  I have three different kinds of expensive vitamin D in my medicine cabinet (Not surprising.  I love to follow trends and the sale of vitamin D supplements rose 82% from 2008 to 2009).  Who is this expert committee telling me what intuitively makes sense?  It is a “14-member expert committee [that] was convened by the Institute of Medicine, an independent nonprofit scientific body, at the request of the United States and Canadian governments. It was asked to examine the available data — nearly 1,000 publications — to determine how much vitamin D and calcium people were getting, how much was needed for optimal health and how much was too much.”

The title of my blog post is a bit misleading.  I don’t actually think we have been subject to a vitamin D conspiracy.  Next week another article could knock down the committee’s findings (but I doubt it).  I don’t believe people like Dr. Sears are trying to mislead the public in some nefarious plot to boost vitamin sales.  But I do believe we as a nation are obsessed with preventing death and disease and colds, an obsession that isn’t necessarily bad, but an obsession that leads us to believe we NEED to take an obscene amount of expensive supplements, that if we don’t put our babies on large vitamin D doses, and that if our babies then get sick, we as mothers are to blame.  This onus is usually put on mothers by mothers and not always by the medical establishment.  Should we eat more healthily?  Absolutely.  Should we all have overstocked cabinets full of every imaginable vitamin?  It has taken me years to finally answer “Absolutely not.”  We can’t vitaminize ourselves or our children against disease.  Now go outside in the sun, sunscreen or not, and play.  That act will make us all healthier than any vitamin can.

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I’m tired and have to pick Amelia up from our 5 hours one day a week babysitter, and I had wanted to write a “Newsroom” piece about Ann Coulter, mostly because her vacant blonde name has surfaced in connection with Elizabeth Edwards’ death, but five hours of freedom has turned me into a manic mommy trying to accomplish a day’s worth of tasks in a few hours (the irony that I’m more exhausted when Amelia goes to a sitter than when I play with her at home), which means all my planned research on Coulter didn’t happen.  Instead, I cleaned the bathrooms.  Perhaps this is why Coulter thinks I shouldn’t vote.  I’m too busy cleaning and not busy reading, but then I suppose if I read instead of clean, she would claim I am trying to be a man.  I’ll get to the not voting part of Coulter’s stupidity in a second.

I feel a great sadness about the passing of Elizabeth Edwards and think Salon.com did a wonderful piece on how the criticism she received in the last few years, ranging from critics calling her a harpy to suggesting she shut it and not tell her side of the story when John Edwards lost his soul, was not warranted.  The article is simply called “She Didn’t Deserve It” and I suggest you read the whole thing, but if you can’t, here is a particularly memorable reference, the one that got me thinking (and fuming) about Ann Coulter.  Joan Walsh writes, “I’ll also fondly remember the Elizabeth Edwards who blindsided the cruel Ann Coulter, phoning into Hardball to confront the conscience-free pundit who’d called her husband a faggot and mocked his handling of his son Wade’s death by suggesting his car sported the bumper sticker, ‘Ask me about my son’s death in a horrific car accident.’ I’m the mother of that boy who died,’ Edwards said when she phoned in, and she reduced Coulter to a babbling ninny complaining that the candidate’s wife was trying to stop her from selling books.”  I watched this piece and Coulter does look like a heartless ninny.

When briefly searching the internet, I came across multiple references to a Coulter quote about women and the right to vote.  I cross checked the quote and amazingly it is real.  Coulter is too narrow-minded and ridiculous to be joking.  She isn’t that nuanced.  No, she hates political dialogue and, apparently, herself so much that she believes the country would be better off if moms and single women stayed home on election day.  Although political power has veered from one party to another, all while women have wielded their soccer mom vote, Coulter feels no need to explain her outlandish thoughts.  That’s what she does.  She makes sweeping claims and generalizations to sell her books and then accuses others of wanting to profit off her free speech when they question her sweeping claims.  It’s exhausting and I’m pretty sure she is a fembot.  Anyway, I need to go fight rush hour traffic and the quote in all its glory is below.  I don’t care if you vote for Republicans, Democrats, or neither, but if you own a Coulter book, you might want to throw it out the window.  Happy Monday.

“If we took away women’s right to vote, we’d never have to worry about another Democrat president. It’s kind of a pipe dream, it’s a personal fantasy of mine, but I don’t think it’s going to happen. And it is a good way of making the point that women are voting so stupidly, at least single women.  It also makes the point, it is kind of embarrassing, the Democratic Party ought to be hanging its head in shame, that it has so much difficulty getting men to vote for it. I mean, you do see it’s the party of women and ‘We’ll pay for health care and tuition and day care — and here, what else can we give you, soccer moms?’”

Oh embarrassing Ann, do you not even wonder how in one breathe you can blame single women and end with a reference to soccer moms?  Try to keep your sexist references consistent.  Ugghhh.

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NPR recently did a stint of stories on siblings.  I’m the only girl sandwiched between two brothers and have read some of the articles suggesting middle children are the left behinds.  When I was growing up I would have gladly believed this, and perhaps there is some truth to this birth order rumor.

When my younger brother graduated from the Air Force Academy in 2006, everyone literally forgot about me when we went out to dinner to celebrate.  I was sitting in the backseat of the car and had the door slammed in my face as I was scrambling to get out.  When I tried to push the door back open I realized my dad had already locked it from the outside, and as I struggled with the child lock, everyone else was in the restaurant.  Sheesh.  That same year, I printed off the course description for my first ever college teaching gig.  I couldn’t get either of my parents to read the printout.  A few months later, as I was telling them about this class, they asked why I had never mentioned it.  I had printed off the description and placed it in front of them!  Jeez Louise.  However, in recent years their house has become a shrine to my wedding and baby, so I’m inclined to think birth order doesn’t determine who commands a parent’s attention.

A recent NPR article/radio segment asks “How Much Does Birth Order Shape Our Lives?” The author, Allison Aubrey, points out that historically the first born male inherited everything through primogeniture and therefore had an incentive to over-achieve and stay in his parents’ good graces.  Even after primogeniture ended, first borns are disproportionately represented in Congress and as the CEOs of companies.  One of the theories explaining this over-representation is that first born children get the undivided attention of newbie parents, both in terms of resources but also in terms of discipline.  More is expected of the first born, resulting in that child giving more, or so goes the theory.  If this theory is correct, I’m not sure why only children wouldn’t edge out those with siblings, maybe because the first born doesn’t only get more resources, but also is expected to act as a responsible example for younger brothers or sisters.

Aubrey ends by talking about “amalgams of experience;”  In other words, the influence of birth order on a person’s experience can’t fully be explained.  Of course not.  However, I’m intrigued by the birth order theories.  I only have one child and sometimes I wonder how my parenting style will differ with the second, if it will change as a reaction to my experience, to another (at this point completely hypothetical) child’s personality, or if it won’t change much at all.  I know in my family, my parents relaxed the rules for both myself and my younger brother, but ultimately their parenting style didn’t change much because their overall values stayed the same.

Perhaps birth order doesn’t fully shape a person’s life, but I’m convinced some general characteristics are shared by many people falling into the same birth order slot.  Why are first born children so prevalent in Congress?  In my completely unscientific observations, I’ve also noticed babies of the family are often class clowns or outgoing or aloof.  Something must be going on.

The NPR article doesn’t look at the way gender affects birth order.  I have noticed many couples expressing a preference for their first born to be male, which seems a bit odd in the absence of something like primogeniture.  Is this a remnant of our feudal past?  A desire for the protective older brother?  Sexism?  I have no idea.  Thank you, NPR.  I’m left with more questions than answers about birth order.  That always happens with public radio, but oh how I love you anyway.

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Did you know a man goes through hormonal changes, mood swings, and morning sickness during the nine months of a woman’s pregnancy?  Perhaps that odd Arnold Schwarzenegger movie from the 90s (what was its name?) was right after all.  This information is based upon the research revealed in Dr. Louann Brizendine’s book The Male Brain; yes, this is the same Brizendine who released the ever popular The Female Brain back in 2007.  I read The Female Brain and found it interesting, even if it used a roller brush to examine a topic full of subtleties, subtleties the media forgot to mention when covering the book.   I’m no scientist, so I appreciate Brizendine’s ability to write pop-neuroscience, if such a thing exists.  I also have a soft spot in my heart for Brizendine, not because of any of her work, but because of a lasting image I have of my husband.

A few years ago, I was reading The Female Brain and commenting on it to Dave, which was rather annoying because I was literally reading passages aloud as Dave was trying to read a different book.  We are co-readers, or, we used to be before Amelia arrived.  In 2007, I went away for the weekend to visit some friends in Boston and Dave didn’t have any Norfolk weekend plans.  He’s always had this fear of eating alone in public places that are usually frequented by couples or groups, the fear of the table for one.  He told me that while I was away he had such a strong urge for a Johnny Rockets hamburger that he went to the mall to get over this fear.  He stopped in the bookstore ahead of time because sitting alone is one thing, but sitting alone without any reading materials is another.  He purchased The Female Brain.  I’m not exactly sure why he purchased a book we already owned.  He sat in that Johnny Rockets on a weekend, all alone, and publicly read The Female Brain, a book with its title emblazoned in hot pink.  What a guy.

I haven’t read The Male Brain.  I hadn’t even heard of this “sequel” until browsing a new to me website Divine Caroline.  The title of the article on Divine Caroline is “Seven Surprising Dad-to-Be Facts.” One of the surprising findings, or maybe not that surprising depending of whom you ask, is that about a month or two into the pregnancy, the soon to be dad can get cranky.  Brizendine credits this to a male time lag.  Even before she pees on a stick, a woman is often looking for signs of a pregnancy.  Brizendine writes, “When the men finally find out, they’re already behind in processing this huge transition, initially feeling very excited but ultimately, when the reality sets in, anxious about being on a runaway train.”  The article notes that this crankiness usually abates as male hormones take over, another surprising fact.  Men can stop complaining that pregnant women are the only ones experiencing hormonal fluctuations.  But, to be fair, the male hormonal change is really just a side effect of the woman’s estrogen aura.

The third surprising fact is the ability of some men to get sympathy morning sickness.  I hate this fact.  I think it’s stupid, dumb, can’t be true.  Okay, I’m biased.  I had SEVERE morning sickness, and I would have screamed at Dave in a hormonal rage if he had compared any sympathy nausea to my plight, but I suppose his increased estrogen would have allowed his new emerging daddy brain to take this all in stride.  I won’t go through all seven of the facts.  In summary, men’s brains also change as our women bodies, and brains, go through a magical metamorphosis.  That said, men, don’t complain about your stomachache as we are hunkered over the toilet.  I don’t care what your brains say.  It’s not the same.

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This is why women want the baby out. No, I didn't have twins. Yes, I was a missile.

While browsing through The Sacramento Bee, my parents’ daily paper (yes, they still get a paper delivered to them), I came across the headline “Health officials urge women not to deliver babies early for convenience.” That’s a good urge, as far as urges go.  However, this article left me confused.

The author, Bobby Caina Calvan, notes that health officials are alarmed by an increase in the number of women choosing to give birth early, but as far as I can tell the numbers don’t show a huge jump.  The article goes on to say that “Perhaps as many as one in every five babies are born early through elective delivery in California–through inducement or Cesarean section, which are done without a medical reason, according to researchers.”  Say what?  What does “perhaps as many” mean in terms of concrete numbers and who are these researchers?

The article sort of answers that last question by singling out The March of Dimes, physician groups, and the California Department of Public Health, all of whom are participating in a campaign to “educate women and empower physicians to reduce the number of elective early births, some occurring nearly a month before due dates.”

Although those three groups suggest both patients and doctors are to blame, The Sacramento Bee article only gives evidence of patient impatience.  Calvan adds, “No one knows how many women opt for early delivery simply to alleviate the routine pains and stresses of pregnancy:  fatigue, back pain, swollen ankles and the other travails of having a baby.”  The article ends with a quote from Dr. William Gilbert.  He says, “I can’t tell you the number of times I have a patient who is so miserable tell me that she just wants to deliver.  I won’t do it.  Unless they hold a gun to me.”  I presume most patients aren’t holding that gun.

I learned nothing from this article.  Pregnant women are tired and cranky and want to get the baby out.  As far as I know, most women can’t perform inductions or c-sections on themselves (and when I say most, I mean all.  If you find a case of a woman doing this on her own, do tell).  The real question is not why women want to deliver early, but why they are allowed to deliver early in non-medically necessary cases.  Dr. Gilbert’s quote suggests doctors don’t give in to their patients’ whims as often as we like to believe, and if they do, blame the medical system, not a woman’s misguided brain or her swollen ankles.

I also wonder how the numbers were calculated, numbers I don’t fully understand and the article doesn’t explain.  Technically, I had an elective induction, but it was almost two weeks after my due date and it turned out to be a good thing, preventing a likely c-section.  I realize my case was an exception, and I obviously do not believe a woman should be induced or given a c-section for no other reason than discomfort, but, again, no where does the article actually prove this is something happening on a regular basis.  It may be happening, but show me some facts.  A more interesting article and more effective public campaign would look at the hospitals, doctors, malpractice, etc…  I say hospitals because home births will not, as a rule, perform elective early deliveries.  Perhaps a campaign directed at women seems easier than taking on the medical establishment, but I’m not so sure this is true.  Who is less rational?  A health care system afraid of its own shadow or a woman in her last trimester?  I can’t answer that question.

*Check out this recent article on unnecessary c-sections, much better than the above take on the topic.  The articles are different:  The Sacramento Bee looks at early inductions and c-sections, while the one on LiveScience only looks at c-sections, early or not.  I should note that although I agree c-sections are on the rise for the wrong reasons, and I agree that very big babies can be delivered vaginally, I still think an induction was right for me and for my body.  Large babies can be delivered naturally by many many women, but, as history has proven, sometimes not so much.  However, too often we focus on the “not so much” and not on the majority of women who don’t need interventions.

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I’ve highlighted a total of eight blogs in my mommy blogger spotlight so far, but I haven’t talked about them in an actual post.  I’ll use this week’s “Newsroom” post to provide a round-up of these blogs.  Although the term “Mommy Blogger” is not without its controversy, I’ve stuck with it in a co-opting the enemy’s phrase kind of way (in other words, I’m sick of the term as a slight and want to use it as a compliment).  If the term “Mommy Blogger” offends you, pretend like its a “Moms who write stuff I read and like” spotlight; as you can hear, that term is like peanut butter on the tongue; it doesn’t roll off very easily.

As the spotlight has shown so far, mommy blogs aren’t a monolithic group only talking about babies’ poops and coos (but we do sometimes, and that is more than okay.)  Here is a rundown of the spotlighted Mommy Blogs and the podcast episodes in which they appear.

1.  Money Saving Mom:  I chose this as the first spotlight because this blog has a specific purpose, and one it does well.  This purpose is to save moms money, hence the apt title.  The blog is a Mommy Blogger bonanza and often pointed to as an example of the power, both purchasing and otherwise, in the mommy blogging world.  The author and creator, a Christian mom who honed her frugal skills while her husband attended law school, provides free downloads for shopping list templates and meal planning schedules.  I used these lists for a little while, failed miserably at coupon cutting, and have since conceded my frugal gene was lost somewhere between the Great Depression and the Baby Boomer era.  That said, when I suddenly feel the desire to economize, I often check back at Money Saving Mom to prove to myself it can be done. [Highlighted in Podcast Episode 7:  In Defense of the Mommy Blogger]

2.  PhD in Parenting:  This is the attachment parent’s mecca.  I’m not a self-described attachment parent (see My Parenting Philosophy), but I have, let’s say, attachment sympathies.  Annie, the blog’s Canadian author, speaks at blogging conferences and attracts a massive following.  Although I don’t always agree with the blog’s tone, I admire the depth of research she will go to when making a point and I appreciate the seriousness with which she approaches her topics.  She has a distinctive online voice, one that oozes integrity. [Highlighted in Podcast Episode 10:  The Case Against the Case Against Breastfeeding]

3.  I’m Totally That Mom:  Jamie of I’m Totally That Mom pointed out PhD in Parenting to me when I was looking for articles and blog posts for a podcast episode on breastfeeding.  Therefore, Jamie’s blog is similar to PhD in Parenting in philosophy, but has a smaller scope.  To explain what I mean I quote her blog banner:  “Yep, I’m *that* mom. Which one might that be? Oh it’s different on any given day. Sometimes I’m the granola crunchy hippy mom… sometimes I’m the mom that wonders if mimosas with breakfast are an okay way to start the day… and all too often I’m the mom who doesn’t remember the last time she got to shower. See which kind of day I’m having by taking a look at the latest entry.” [Highlighted in and guest host of Podcast Episode 10:  The Case Against the Case Against Breastfeeding]

4.  Motherlode:  This is The New York Times‘ in house mommy blog by Lisa Belkin.  I have quite a few blogs on my google reader that I check every so often, but only one on my iGoogle page, and this is the one.  Belkin has been a writer for The New York Times for over a decade and is an author of a few books.  In other words, she is one of the top mommy bloggers out there.  If you are looking for a blog with a journalistic tinge, this is the one to read on a regular basis. [Highlighted in Podcast Episode 11:  Baby Led Solids]

5.  Anonymous 8:  The Welcome page on Anonymous 8 says it “started as a group of 35-55 year old women who talk about everything.  From the secrets of the bedroom to little-talked-about female issues, our friendship has changed our lives, offering a safe place to find advice and answers to embarrassing questions.” I’m not in the 35-55 year old age bracket (I’m 29 in case you were wondering), but I can appreciate a blog with a no topic off limits boast.  Sure, Anonymous 8 is not a mommy blog in the traditional sense of the term, whatever sense that is, but many of the “embarrassing questions” revolve around motherhood.  [Highlighted in Podcast Episode 12:  What's a Doula]

6.  Pundit Mom:  Pundit Mom is Joanne Bamberger who is “a writer, political commentator, political/media analyst and recovering attorney living in the shadow of the nation’s capital.”  She writes in many other places, but I discovered her work through her well-articulated blog.  Some of her posts say exactly what I’m, unknowingly, thinking, quite a feat since I’m a self-proclaimed over-thinker.  Bamberger is more liberal than not, so if you are the conservative type, consider yourself forewarned.  That said, I wouldn’t call her blog a liberal diatribe in the least.  She focuses a lot on popular culture and on political women, a nice resource for someone like me who wants to avoid politics but sometimes can’t help myself.  [Highlighted in Podcast Episode 13:  Bad Mother]

7.  One Year in the Domestic Church:  Abby’s project for One Year in the Domestic Church is like a Catholic version of Julie and Julia.  She talks about how her family celebrates saint’s days and Church feasts.  She includes descriptions of meals she makes and a history of some of the days/feasts.  I’m not Catholic, far from it, so you might be wondering how I even came across her blog. Abby is my cousin and has appeared on a few podcast episodes.  Considering my non-Catholic inclinations, I was surprised by how much I enjoy reading her blog.  [Highlighted in and guest co-host of Podcast Episode 14:  The Child Un-Friendly Skies]

8.  Late Enough:  Alex Iwashyna appeared on Podcast Episode 8:  The Over-Educated Stay at Home Mom, and I felt compelled to highlight her blog once again because I am still reading it on a daily basis.  Late Enough is the quintessential mommy blog in that she talks about her family and her life, but it hovers above the blogging crowd due to her writing style and sense of humor.    [Highlighted in Podcast Episode 15:  Your Post Baby Marriage]

That’s the round up.  None of these bloggers asked to be spotlighted, most probably don’t even know I have included them (and I hope they don’t mind).  The internet runneth over with mommy blogs and sometimes a little direction helps.  If you have your own favorites, don’t hesitate to send me an email or comment below.

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Image: Francesco Marino / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

A headline on Salon.com recently caught my eye: Men Who Clean House are Happier. I was particularly intrigued by the incomplete comparison.  Are domesticated men happier than men who don’t know where their wives keep the cleaning supplies or are they happier than men who wear argyle socks?  The title doesn’t really make that clear, but I suppose I’m over-thinking the grammar.

As you may have noticed by previous “Newsroom” posts, I’m a sucker for short, snappy articles that rely on polls, which is strange because I also hate polls and the odd causalities they often set up.  That said, I LOVE this survey.  The background is as follows:  A survey of 1,000 British working dads revealed that men who take on “more housework” (again, more than what?) and whose wives put in a similar number of hours as their husbands in the workplace are happier.  Let’s disregard the problem of measuring happiness and instead bask in the conclusions we can draw.  Housework makes men happy, not just the women who can do less of it!  As someone who hates housework, I’m eating up this study like the Halloween candy that didn’t last two days in this house.

The Salon article makes some great points about our limitations in understanding the survey.  Tracy Clark-Flory writes, “Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean we’ve discovered the secret to paternal or marital happiness. Maybe those equality-minded men are happier because of their chore-sharing or maybe happier men are more likely to split the housework. It could be something entirely different — perhaps mopping the floor effectively releases stress and working partners get in each others’ hair less. We just don’t know.”

Personally, I think the reason married men who take on some housework are happier than those who don’t is simple.  As Dave likes to say, “Happy Wife, Happy Life.”  A person’s happiness in a relationship is often directly connected to the happiness of his/her partner.  If both partners feel like they not only are doing their fair share, but that their fair share isn’t one-sided, the overall relationship happiness level would increase.  I’m a stay at home mom who really hates housework and cooking and because I am a stay at home mom I tend to do most of the housework (but not the cooking).  This is fine for now, but Dave and I have weekend chores to make sure I’m not harboring resentment as I mop floors (that is, if I mopped floors).  I know some women don’t mind doing the bulk of the housework and some women really like creating a lovely home environment or doing all the cooking, but I also know many women are like me:  It’s not really our thing.

I realize as a stay at home mom, I’m also the minority.  This study emphasizes the rising number of working women and how this has changed the relationship status quo.  Women have been in the workforce long enough to effectively change the way domestic relationships are structured, and if this means more men of my generation than of my father’s generation are expected to vacuum or wash dishes, great.  Frankly, this survey is interesting not because it shows that men are doing these things–it’s not 1970 after all–but that men don’t resent doing these things.  I’ve also noticed a trickle up effect.  As I write this, my dad is cooking Sunday dinner and my mom is vacuuming, definitely not a scene from my childhood.

I can’t imagine being in a relationship where my role or Dave’s role had been pre-determined.  I remember asking my grandmother how she felt about cooking and cleaning when she had children and was working as a legal secretary.  She said she never like doing any of it, but that was what a wife did.  Well, I don’t like doing it either, so Dave and I talk about our expectations and roles.  Since I’m at home, I do more and that makes sense, but I don’t do all, and I can say both Dave and I are happier when he vacuums.  I, because that chore is out of my domain, he, because “a happy wife, a happy life.”  Those are his words, not mine.

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Each holiday, the internet lights up with various musings on our American traditions, some interesting, most not. To be honest, Halloween is not a holiday I’ve spent much time contemplating. I like costumes. I like candy. I like babies dressed up as pumpkins. What’s not to love? I’ve spent a few Halloweens in foreign countries, one in Prague where I dressed up as an American tourist to attend a Scandinavian party; this in a country that doesn’t celebrate the holiday. Most people asked if I had actually purchased anything for the costume or if I had pulled my “Czech me out” sweatshirt and fanny pack from my closet. My friend dressed up as static cling, a particularly confusing costume in a country with few dryers. We decided Halloween isn’t quite the same without our American traditions and sensibilities.

In the last few days, I’ve come across two particularly great blog posts on the holiday. I know I’m going against the grain by posting my own musing about these musings the day after Halloween, but I’ve settled on Monday as my “newsroom” day; plus, why not try to parse what happened last night.

The first post is by my cousin Abby who writes over at One Year in the Domestic Church. Her post approaches Halloween from a Catholic perspective. I myself am not Catholic, but I’m convinced by her evidence showing the Christian origins of the holiday, all in an attempt to convert her husband to the tradition. Knowing what her almost one year old son Teddy looks like, I hope her husband, Jon, comes over to the pro-Halloween side for the sake of baby costumes and cuteness.  Although I disagree with his interpretation, Jon’s reasoning that Halloween encourages entitlement, as in children feel entitled to candy, is a refreshingly new and humorous critique of the holiday, even if I’m pretty sure Jon isn’t joking when he says this.  I suppose my retort would be that Halloween actually contains any unsavory elements of society by rendering begging into a well-organized “trick or treat” binary.  I knew that trick or treating was a new phenomenon from the late 1930s, but I like Abby’s research into the Christian and English tradition of asking for “soul cakes” in the 7th century.

The other post I want to highlight is by Snarky in the Suburbs called “Hold on Halloween, I’m Coming to Save You!” She starts the post by identifying her attackers:  “I don’t know how and I don’t care why, but every year it seems more people try to take an awesome celebration that is totally costume and most importantly candy focused and attempt to turn it into a healthy dried apple snack pack, carrot and zucchini stick platter with non dairy ranch dressing dip, pumpkin, gourd and corn festival.  Halloween is not any of those things!  It is an extraordinary wonderful time of junk food and flowing costumes that disguise an ever-expanding middle-aged midriff all experienced under the influence of a sugar high.  In other words – perfection.”  She refers to the anti-candy faction as the “No Funs” and the religious opponents as the “Harvest Hallelujahs” (sorry Jon).

I’m definitely in the Snarky camp, but I’m also a history addict and learned a lot from Abby’s inquiry into the holiday’s origins.  As it stands now, Halloween is purely commercial, but I think this is why it’s so fun.  It’s a day of carnivale, a time to dress up your baby, scoff at scantily clad, misguided women, and eat so much sugar you are bouncing off the walls.  Recently, I listened to Dr. Robert Sears explain the way he approaches Halloween candy consumption.  He let’s his children have one piece a day.  I can’t argue with his logic:  This teaches moderation and limits the evil effects of high fructose corn syrup, but somehow I just don’t see myself doing that with Amelia.  Are we bad parents if we allow our kids to trick or treat and overindulge on candy?  Maybe.  Are we “No Funs”?  I can’t answer because I’m too busy eating a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup.

Image: Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Most fliers hate kids, or something like that.  I’m preparing to record a podcast on traveling with baby and came across a reference to a Skyscanner poll from August.  I should probably save my horror, disgust, and terror for the podcast episode, but Halloween is near and those adjectives deserve their own post.

I’m less horrified/disgusted/terrorized by the actual poll than by the comments to the USA Today article describing this poll.  Before I get to some of these spooky comments, I should summarize Skyscanner’s findings.  60% of 2,000 travelers said they would like airlines to have a separate families only section on airplanes and 20% said they would prefer child free flights.  I’m not sure of the exact wording of the questions.  Would people prefer child free flights like I would prefer to bathe in chocolate, a blissful daydream but an impractical preference?  Or would they prefer child free flights like I would prefer Christine O’Donnell not become a senator, a very strong preference indeed.  Either way, this USA Today article received 710 comments, many of which made my blood boil then steam then evaporate into the air I was breathing, thereby becoming part again of my being.  In other words, I had a physical reaction.

The current first comment is by someone uncleverly calling himself mb56; I believe it stands for Major Boar.  He responds to another’s reasonable plea of “Did you ever think that it is more stressful on the parents than even those nearby – babies cry – you were a baby once and your parents had to travel” with “Actually my parents, being the considerate folks they are, didn’t travel by plane with us kids until we were 6 years old. More people should follow their lead. Inconvenient sometimes, and some trips just had to wait, but they didn’t feel it was right to burden others with their decision to have children.”

As if Major Boar’s boarishness wasn’t obvious enough, he elaborates by explaining, “Having a child in this day and age is a completely voluntary life-style decision. Why is it that people who decide to have children think that they should be immune from short-term sacrifices during this process. It is a simple basic fact that very young children can be extremely annoying, and ill-behaved ones completely intolorable. Parents should be willing to accept some limitations on what they can do with their very children in public – it was their decision to have them.”

I love that Mr. Boar believes waiting six years to travel by plane because of my life-style choice to procreate is a short-term sacrifice.  Amelia should not meet Dave’s side of the family, should not meet her Great-Grandfather, should not see her Nonni and Pop, should not meet her only Aunt, because some people cannot tolerate to be around babies.  My fear of being “that” mom in December when we fly with our fussy Amelia has now changed to hope I get to sit next to My Boar (okay, I’m lying.  I’m still terrified).

Other comments refer to business travelers, suggesting we parents have no more right to invade their flying office than they have to invade our homes while our babies sleep.  Of course the most obvious problem with this logic is that Southwest is not your flying office!

The whole point of the Skyscanner poll is lost on me.  Obviously, a separate family section is just as impractical as a separate smoking section in restaurants, not to mention fiscally unfeasible.  Smoke travels, so do babies’ voices, and families have to pay to fly their screaming broods, just like the business travelers setting up camp in their mythical public offices.  In the meantime, I’m putting together my own anti-boar poll.

Image: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Recently the internet world, as opposed to the real world, has been abuzz with studies showing that couples with kids are less satisfied than those without, that kids are (gasp) expensive, and that women with university educations who take a few years off (or more) to raise their kids experience a “motherhood premium.”  Although these are all interesting topics, I tend to place these findings into the Duh category.

The most recent addition to the slew of kids are expensive to your financial and emotional well-being articles is one by Syndey Lagier, a blogger who retired, childless, at 44.  I have never ever been someone to judge another for choosing not to have children.  Kids are life changing additions and need to be wanted.  You can’t have half a child, unless your baby was born with a medical problem, but I’m inclined to believe you still wouldn’t call your legless child half a person.  Choosing to procreate is a big deal and choosing not to procreate is a big deal.  It defines your life.  My best friend has known since she was a little girl that she doesn’t want kids and has faced repeated comments about her selfishness, which I think is silly.  I consider her wise for knowing what she wants, or, I suppose, for what she doesn’t want.

However, articles attempting to quantify the effect children have on couples are not all that useful.  Even Lagier admits her decision to not have kids had nothing to do with the money she would save or with her chance to retire early.  She calls this an added perk.  Lagier, I’m happy for your added perk, but not sure what point you are trying to make when you reference studies about the inverse relationship between personal bliss and procreation.  If you had asked me this morning after waking up at 3am to feed my baby girl if my bliss was greater or lesser than than that of my pre baby world, I would have shouted “Lesser than! Lesser than!”  I’m tired and cranky.  I have a fussy baby; of course I feel like I got the short end of the stick.  This is the problem with trying to measure the amount of happiness children bring to the table.  But would I give up my baby?  Would you give up yours?  I’m making up this statistic, but I’m willing to wager that 99.9 percent of parents would physically harm the person who tried to take away their children, which, if we read all these studies literally, might not be the most rational choice if we are tying to increase personal bliss.

In her article, Lagier begins by comparing kids to lattes.  She writes, “According to this calculator at Babycenter.com, the cost of raising and educating the requisite 2.3 kids where I live would have set me back nearly a million dollars. That’s a lot of lattes. I would have had to forego nearly 273,000 lattes to generate that kind of cash. Even if I stopped at the coffee shop every day on the way to work, it would have taken me 1,092 latte-free years to amass that pile of cash.”  I’m trying to figure out the point of this comparison, other than to rehash the latte metaphor.  Kids are expensive.  Kids make you cranky.  Kids often derail, at least temporarily, a mother’s career path.  Kids make marriages less satisfying.  Fewer women are having babies than before (yet she doesn’t mention the rise in infertility treatments such as in vitro).  She attempts to draw sweeping conclusions based on these scattered, and what I consider obvious, studies.

My love for Amelia is so difficult to explain, difficult to quantify, difficult to measure, that no blog post or article can show the impact she has had on my life.  No survey can measure love or satisfaction.  Producing heirs, whether biological or adoptive, is so much a part of our human drive that no amount of information about cost or martial satisfaction or early retirement is going to stop this urge.  Sure, more women will opt out of procreation, but perhaps these women would have opted out in previous generations anyway; career opportunities, not to mention birth control, have provided women with more options.  No need to be the dissatisfied heroines of a Kate Chopin novel.

The title of Lagier’s article is “To Retire Early, Don’t Have Kids.”  If I really wanted to be snarky I could respond with “To Never Grow Up and Die Alone, Don’t Have Kids,” but, to be honest, I don’t believe that.  If you don’t want kids, don’t have kids, but please don’t paint those of us who have chosen this route as frazzled, unhappy, poor, underemployed, depressed moms and dads.  Sure, I may fit that bill right now, but one moment of seeing my baby smile, one moment of gazing into her eyes as she nurses, one moment of cuddling are all worth more than the 273,000 lattes I can’t buy.

A couple weeks ago Lisa Belkin of The New York Time‘s Motherlode posted on her blog about a ban on screaming children at the Olde Salty Restaurant near Carolina Beach, N.C.  The restaurant got quite a bit of media coverage for its sign exclaiming “Screaming Children WILL NOT be Tolerated!”  I don’t know about you, but a sign like that makes me want to run inside and yell at the top of my lungs.  I think I have a problem because I always have the urge to jump on stage during a play or musical.  I’m not theatrical, just strange.  Thankfully, I’ve never given into this urge.

The Olde Salty is no dress and tie kind of place; the sign looks like a computer print-out taped to the window.

oh, the intolerance

The restaurant’s owner, Brenda, claims most of the reaction to her sign has been positive.  Lisa Belkin invites a Harvard psychologist into her post to talk about how to handle your own screaming children.  I could talk about the problem with relying on psychologists to tell us how to raise our kids, but the comments to Belkin’s blog post are way more interesting than Dr. Bromfield (no offense, Doctor, I’m sure you are smart).  Her post got 336 comments as of today.  After I got over my initial jealousy, I started to read them.  They were the usual back and forth between the learn to live with people and get over your fear of screaming kids crowd versus the your kids are a nuisance and its all your fault because you are a lenient and bad mother crowd.  But nestled in this was one golden post I will write below.  In comment number five, Bob of Denver announced,

“Not quite sure why we are addressing the 2% of the children that would be a behavior issue? If your child has issues, God forbid, you certainly wouldn’t be a bother. Just announce your son/daughter has some issues and if they get out of hand, you as the parent, will take care of it. Or leave.

The other 98% need to teach their children some manners. Good luck with that. The parents of these kids are usually screaming themselves at other screamers into a phone..

A seminal moment in my now 23 year old daughters life occurred in a restaurant. At the age of five she was slapped for the first and last time in her life. Never disrespected her mother or me again. Restaurants can provide a teaching moment.”

The most hilarious part of this scary comment was the 21 people who recommended it.  I suppose restaurants can provide a teaching moment, but I would like to ask his daughter if she would use the word “seminal” to describe getting slapped in public.

*As you can tell by my oddly high number of references to Lisa Belkin, I really do like her blog, even if my post sounded a tad snarky.

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I used to think the idiom “eyes in the back of their heads” best described mothers or teachers.  I haven’t been a mother long enough to fully appreciate this skill, but when I was a teacher I often surprised my students with my ability to pick up on their covert text messaging or off-topic conversations; however, this wasn’t a difficult task.  I was always amazed by how obvious their texting was or by their inability to fathom that a magical screen did not separate the teacher and students during group work, or maybe I just have good hearing.

My cousin Abby sent me an interesting article from Wired by Jonah Lehrer called “What is it Like to be a Baby?” I expected an article attempting to ascertain babies’ emotional states, something I’m “so over” after reading one too many debates over cry it out versus non-cry it out.  I was so wrong.  This article is about the way babies interact with their environments, particularly the way they see.  Moms and teachers do not have eyes in the back of their heads, but babies do.

The crux of the argument is demonstrated by the article’s closing:

I’m adding a new section to the blog, something I’m going to call “Around the Blogosphere” or “In the News” or “Stuff Other People Said” or something like that.  In addition to my iGoogle RSS feeds, I’ve discovered Google Reader, only after my beloved Bloglines closed its internet doors, so I’ve been able to increase my internet ingestion, not sure if that is good, but it is.

I’ve mentioned my fangirl status for the website Live Science, but I’ve recently questioned how easily I drink up the studies purporting to prove colds cause fat kids, or, and more dangerously, mothers should blame themselves for their kids’ depression.  I love studies and I love statistics, but I’m suspicious of what I love (Dave, no need to fret, I’m only referring to this website).

This morning I was greeted by the headline “Good Mothering Soothes Babies Born to Be Fussy.” Yuck.  I hate titles like that, with the converse implication that bad mothering, whatever that is in this study, causes the opposite.  What about bad fathering or good fathering?  According to the study, “Dad’s responsiveness showed a similar effect, but the results were not statistically significant.” You’ve got to be kidding me.  How did they prove this you may ask.  I quote below:

“The researchers collected data on 281 families, each consisting of a mother and father and an adopted infant, plus the child’s birth mother. They asked the adoptive parents about the baby’s fussiness, which gave them insight into the child’s emotional distress. The adoptive parents also filled out psychological questionnaires designed to measure depression symptoms.

The researchers also gathered data on whether the birth mothers had depression. Finally, a trained observer watched the parents interact with their adopted child at 9 months of age to determine how responsive the parents were to the child’s needs.

Nine months later, when the babies were 18 months old, the researchers again evaluated children’s level of fussiness.”

Based on this very limited observational and questionnaire heavy method of analysis, the researchers concluded the following:

“In babies whose birth moms had depression — babies who, because of their biological family history, were at higher risk for the disorder themselves — the environment mattered, too. When adoptive moms were unresponsive to at-risk babies (failing to give the child positive feedback or comfort them when needed, for example), the babies were likely to be fussy nine months later.

But when adoptive moms were responsive, those babies showed no more fussiness than if they’d never had a genetic risk at all.”

There you have it.  The nature versus nurture conundrum has been solved.  Close up your books.  Go home.  Debate is over.

After participating in a giant research study put on by UCSD about maternal mental health, I now have a new understanding of how flawed these studies are by necessity.  A woman interviews me over the phone and asks multiple choice questions about my mental health, scores the questionnaire, and then tells me if I am depressed enough to continue in the study.  The biggest problem is having a person ask the questions.  I try to be honest whenever they call, but who wants to tell a stranger how often she cries?  It sounds so pathetic when stated aloud.  The first questionnaire was not via phone, but that was also flawed because, as an overthinker, I didn’t feel any of my four choices really reflected my mental state.  I honestly think this is why they pushed me into the next part of the study.  My severe morning sickness made me unhappy, but no where could I write the cause of my unhappiness.  The study includes thousands of women, not the measly hundreds from the article, and I’m still convinced the results will not be that useful because of its structure.  My point, and I do have one, is that psychological questionnaires and limited observations do not real evidence make.  Maybe this is the best we have in terms of studying depression.  Fine.  So be it.  However, pretending like the conclusions are facts is annoying at best, dangerous at worst.  Maybe attentive mothering can decrease a genetic predisposition to depression.  That isn’t an outlandish hypothesis, but it is still only a hypothesis, regardless of what this study says.  Oh, and whoever wrote the title of the article, shame on you for perpetuating the binary between good and bad mothering.  My rant is over.  Good timing because I hear Amelia stirring.  I better run to her for fear of bringing out her latent depression.   Happy Monday.