Diapers: They're Full of Sh*t

Guest Post by Sarah Gatenby

As a parent, one of the truest truths is that you will be talking about poop. A lot. In fact, between the first post-partum poop (keep taking those stool softeners) and the 50 shades of baby’s first BM, your life is going to revolve around crap. It’s just how things go.

Before my child was born, I watched the movie “Babies,” a really awesome documentary that everyone should watch before having one of their own, and I was amazed by how the mom in Namibia wiped her baby’s butt with her leg and then her leg with a corn cob (or something other than Pampers Free and Natural wipes). And as I changed diaper after diaper after diaper with my own newborn, I often recalled with gratitude that at least I don’t have to wipe my baby’s butt with my leg and then my leg with a corncob. Well, I sometimes thought of that, and sometimes I just wished there was a magic wand that would get the poop off of everything, especially car seat covers.

This all brings us to the very important topic of diapers. You have almost as many diapering options as there are shades of newborn poop. At my house, we used mostly cloth diapers for the first 4 months, cloth at home and disposables at day care for months 5 and 6, and mostly disposables from month 6 to the present. Based on my experience with cloth-only, hybrid, and disposable-only, I offer my review of some of your poop-containment options:

1. Cloth Diapers: These are good for people who feel guilty about filling up landfills and like doing laundry. They are also awesome for compulsive nesters because you are supposed to wash the cotton ones a bunch of times before your baby is born to get them soft and fluffy and absorbent. Cloth diapers are a pricey initial investment, but can be reused for multiple children, and you can sell them when you’re done. (My husband thought that buying pre-used diapers was too gross, but I bet he won’t mind me selling ours). They also help assuage the guilt you might feel about birthing another pollution machine. If you live somewhere where water is scarce or don’t have your own washing machine, they might not be for you. Some people find that cloth diapers are bulky and they have to go a size up in clothing, but I didn’t experience that. There are several subtypes:

A.     Prefolds and covers - If you wore cloth diapers, you probably wore prefolds. The covers have come a long way since your mother’s era. The prefold soaks up the pee and poo, and the PUL (polyurethane laminate) cover attempts to keep it contained. Unlike the rubber covers of your hippie youth, PUL covers are thin, flexible, and waterproof, and they are relatively cheap. If you prefer spending lots of money and have servants who wash your clothes by hand, you can buy wool covers, which are sewn from unicorn hair that absorbs liquid by the gallon and is self-cleaning. The covers come in fun prints and colors. The diapers can be used for burp cloths, changing table pads, and cleaning up spills. If your kid doesn’t get crap on the cover, it can be used more than once before washing. Depending on the size of your baby, you may need pins or a “snappy” fastener to keep the prefold around his waist and legs. YouTube has a plethora of videos online with instructions on getting the most secure fit from a prefold + cover system.

B.     All In Ones (AIO) – With AIOs, the cover and the diaper are all attached. You might like these if you like never really getting anything quite 100% clean or dry. Sometimes the absorbent insert is snapped into the cover so the two can be washed separately. Inserts are often made of finicky material like hemp and bamboo that perpetually smells like ammonia. I didn’t like these much at all. And mine leaked. Maybe you’ll have better luck. They also tend to be pricey.

C.     Pocket diapers – These are just like they sound. There’s a pocket in the cover where you shove the absorbent insert. Pulling the poop-covered insert out of the pocket afterwards can be gross, but you’re probably going to wash your hands anyway, right? You can use prefolds or “doublers” as inserts, but most pocket diapers come with an insert or two. For nighttime, add an extra insert or doubler (I personally liked the thin, absorbent, but of course, costlier bamboo inserts). These are easy to use, easy to wash and come in even more cute prints. They start at around $5 dollars a diaper for a cheap diaper and can run up to close to $30 a dipe for fancy prints in a fancy name brand with several bamboo inserts. Yes, some diapers cost as much as an entire outfit from Target, but at least most cloth diapers grow with your baby.

Many people, myself included, use some combination of the above, depending on baby’s age and whether you spend most of the day at home, at day-care, or at the grocery store trying to remember if you need milk. Some diapers are “one-size” and have a series of snaps that allow you to use them on babies ranging from 10 to 20+ lbs, and others are sized for more specific weight-ranges. It can be intimidating to start off with cloth diapering, so read a few articles and join a message board or two before you max out your credit card on fleece covers on Etsy only to discover your kid is allergic to synthetics.

2. Disposable diapers: These are good for people who have kids in daycare, don’t have laundry facilities at home, dislike washing poop, or are passionate about filling up landfills with their kid’s shit. While we/I cloth-diapered for the first 6 months, once the kid started eating food and was in daycare, we switched to disposable diapers. They are easier to put on and take off. And there’s no laundry required. Again, there are several choices.

A.     Name Brand (Huggies, Luvs, Pampers) - Name brand diapers soak up more pee. That’s all there is to it. Whatever polymersilicadiapergoop they use is amazing. For nighttime dryness, I vote name brand. Shop the sales, find some coupons, or only use them at night to save some dough, but changing your kid (and the sheets) at 2am because you bought the grocery store brand again isn’t fun. I think Huggies smell weird when wet, but you might not. Pampers Ultra Overnight are excellent for heavy nighttime wetters.

B.     Store Brand  (Target, grocery store, big-box discount store) – Store brand diapers are usually cheaper. I find Target brand to work fine for daytime use with a non-newborn.

C.     Fancy Brand (Honest Co, Seventh Generation, Earth’s Best) - These are the diapers that are either eco-friendly or have cute prints or both. They run about 40 to 50 cents a pee/poop. I’m all for reducing use of petrochemicals and plastics, especially next to butts, balls, and vaginas, but remember, for something to biodegrade, it can’t be buried in a landfill…

3. Hybrid diapers: Can’t decide between doing tons of laundry and filling up the landfill? No worries! With a disposable insert and washable cover, these diapers allow you to do both! The best (and worst) of both types.

No matter the type of diaper you decide to go with, there will be a brand that works better for your kid and a brand that doesn’t work as well. These maxims should always hold true:

• Don’t stock up on one type of diaper, for that will be the type that makes your child’s butt break out like a acne-plagued teenager with chicken pox.
• Three pee-leaks in two days or less means you should go up a size. Don’t focus on the weight recommendations on the package as they are completely made up.
• When poop is in your child’s hair, it is probably also on their back and hands.
• Car seats give a baby the best angle for pooping.
• Car seats are not fully washable.

It’s nice to have so many options for catching our kids’ crap. Some parents even go diaperless and use “elimination communication,” but that’s a different post for a different writer. Whatever you choose or end up using after your first three choices don’t work for you, remember that WIC and SNAP benefits don’t cover diapers. Parents who are struggling to make ends meet often end up reusing disposable diapers or leaving their child in a wet or dirty diaper for longer than they’d like. When you have leftover diapers that are too small for your child or when you’re done using your cloth diapers, consider donating to your local diaper bank or food bank or pantry.

 If you have gotten bitten by the cloth diaper (or CD) bug, there are several websites that I liked to browse as I was getting ready for the baby.

• Kawaii Diapers - cheap and cute, but not so informative
• The Bump Cloth Diapering Board - generally less snarky and more helpful than other Bump boards
• Green Mountain Diapers -  great source for prefolds and they have helpful info about lots of different types of diapers. DO NOT read their laundry guide. It will make you cry.
• Kelly’s Closet - another good source for cloth diapering supplies and FAQs

Nesting Gone Wild

For every list available on the internet of essential baby gear items that you absolutely must have to survive early parenthood, there are parallel lists of items that you do not need. All of these lists include a wipe warmer, presumably because babies don’t really care if their hineys are cold, and also because wipe warmers frequently catch fire. But some lists are far more subjective—I recently came across one that insisted you do not need to buy a crib, because obviously junior will be sleeping beside you until he is two years old and ready for his own straw pallet in the barn. Like most aspects of parenting, learning what you do and do not need to make life a little easier occurs through trial and error. One person’s Sleep Sheep is another person’s Peepee Teepee, and who are any of us to judge the talismans another holds dear when trying to extend her baby’s wake-up time from 4:45am to 4:55am because those ten minutes actually are the difference between giving a passable presentation at her quarterly sales meeting and falling asleep at a red light with her eyes open and remaining that way until somebody calls the police because they assume she is dead.

That said, I do think there are some things that you can wait to buy until after your baby is born and you have an actual test subject to experiment on, or items for which you should retain the receipt or return for store credit if received as a gift. With the tremendous depth of experience provided by having had one child for well over two years, I offer the following list of items you should hold off on buying/unpackaging until your baby’s unique personality reveals itself and you discover he’s either an agreeable little angel with a textbook growth curve or a cantankerous malcontent with chronic diarrhea:

1) Newborn-Size Diapers/Clothes + Size-Up Clothes: I disagree with the recommendation that you should not buy ANY clothes in NB size, but don’t necessarily rip the tags off every single teensy-tiny three-piece newborn outfit you receive at your baby shower. I fully expected to follow family tradition and give birth to a 10-pound baby who could sit up on his own at two months supported purely by fat rolls, but my son was 7 lbs at birth, plus he dropped a few ounces during his colostrum fast and did not end up gaining weight like an off-season high school wrestler, so we needed some NB size clothes and diapers, but not a huge stockpile. He went on to experience seemingly random growth spurts and plateaus throughout his first two years, the former generally occurring within hours of me returning from the Carter’s outlet, thus buying clothes even 3 months ahead was risky. It’s nice to have a little stash of outfits in multiple sizes that you’ll use regardless of season, like cotton sleepers, but I would not recommend going nuts on Zulily’s summer smocking sale in November until you’re well into toddler sizes.

2) Adorable Bibs and Burp Cloths: Daddy’s Lil’ Linebacker, Mommy’s Perfect Gentleman, Property of Grandma, I Poop on Michigan (go Buckeyes)—there’s nothing cuter to compliment the perfect Babies R Us outfit than a pristine cotton bib, lined in gingham and embroidered with love. Except if your newborn actually requires a bib due to reflux, Baby’s First Christmas will be permanently stained with chunky yellow crust that smells like rotten milk, as will everything else both you and he are wearing, sitting on, and standing near, because those adorable bibs are worthless when it comes to actual absorbency. Before baby is born, buy a few packs of cheap terry cloth bibs, and if you discover you have birthed a tiny fire hydrant of stomach acid, I recommend Maxi Moo Moo bibs or something similar with a snap collar (Velcro doesn’t survive the multiple daily washes) and an interior plastic lining. Same goes for burp cloths—skip the 12 square-inches of organic pima cotton printed with duckies and lambies and hearts that won’t even protect your left pinky finger from the volcanic uprising created by two tablespoons of breastmilk and your newborn’s untested digestive system, and instead invest in a pile of cheap, dark colored towels from Wal-Mart, plus a commercial painter’s drop cloth and possibly a few sets of surgical scrubs to save your furniture and your nursing tops. (Even for non-refluxy babies, regular cotton burp cloths are pretty pointless, but cotton prefold cloth diapers, when properly prepped, are excellent alternatives).

3) Receiving Blankets: Blankets of all shapes and sizes and materials are handy and cute and make great backgrounds for your monthly Facebook photo updates, but you do not need to buy these yourself, because I swear that 90% of the gifts you receive after the baby arrives will be blankets. People love buying baby blankets—it’s like we all secretly long to be swaddled in pastel velvet. If you live in the South, people will go so far as to monogram them for you, meaning your firstborn will always be properly identified when blanketed with love and your second child will begin developing her inferiority complex from birth.

4) Special Swaddle Blankets: By these I mean the wide variety of blankets that are cut in certain shapes and offer a variety of fastening devices intended to make it easier for you to swaddle your irate little banshee at 4am rather than screaming at your spouse that only an inbred moron would take this long to locate the diagram in The Happiest Baby on the Block that you clearly bookmarked in your 34th week of pregnancy after you both spent an afternoon practicing the “five Ss” on your neighbor’s dachshund. There is nothing wrong with any one of these blankets, but your particular infant may only respond to a certain type of swaddle, such as one that allows him to suck on his hands, like this; or he may emerge from the womb like a mini Houdini capable of busting out of titanium Velcro and thus require snaps; or he may be like my kid and defy God and nature by despising the swaddle entirely, preferring instead the warm embrace of a sleep-sack dampened with his mother’s exhausted tears. Since any one of these swaddle-saviors runs from $15 to $40, it doesn’t hurt to put a few different kinds on your registry and let your wealthier friends buy them for you, but hold onto the receipts and check store return policies so you can trade them in for whichever type of straitjacket your genetic miracle ultimately prefers.

5) Breastfeeding/Pump Supplies & Accessories: Go ahead and order your breast pump through your insurance company well before your due date (if allowed, some insurance companies require you to wait), and keep in mind that many HSA or FSA accounts can be used for breastfeeding and pumping supplies, but don’t go hog wild and fill your hall linen closet with tubes of lanolin and self-adhesive breast pads like you intend to breastfeed through the zombie apocalypse. Many women with the most ambitious goals find that they are unable to breastfeed, or that it simply isn’t right for them or their baby, or that their baby finds sucking on a nipple smeared in lanolin about as delectable as you would find pouring petroleum jelly on your breakfast cereal. The same goes for milk freezer bags and pump wipes and sterilization kits—put down the Amazon app and go settle your nesting crazy by folding a few tiny hats or smelling another pile of freshly laundered onesies. All of these accessories can be valuable tools in your blissful journey through cracked nipples and overactive let-down, but they will still be there in the warehouse in Chattanooga, primed for same-day delivery, once the actual need arises.

6) Bottles & Nipples & Sippy Cups: It turns out that babies can be as picky about what type of bottle and nipple they prefer as your asshole brother-in-law is about craft beer. You think the set of BPA-free Dr. Brown’s 4-ounce bottles with the Level 1 even-flow nipple are the cat’s meow because that’s what all the experienced moms on your birth-month Facebook group recommended, but your 6 week-old gags and sputters when you try to feed him like you’ve secretly exchanged his Hops Valley Hoppity Hopster IPA for Miller Lite. Sometimes finding the right bottle and nipple takes a few tries. Same goes for sippy cups, so as brilliant as it might seem to have your child’s entire life through college paid for by your mom’s quilting circle via your shower registry, it’s best not to test the upper limits of Target’s return policy on 16 Munchkin Click-Locks once you discover that your toddler only does Nuby Super Spout.

7) Baby Swing/Mamaroo: Another good item to register for so other people pay for it, but again, save the receipt and check the limit on returns. Some parents swear by these contraptions, others find they are the first baby item to be sold over the neighborhood listserv. My son was born savvy enough to tell the difference between my loving, mind-numbingly exhausted embrace and a motorized negligence machine, thus I never used one, but I know plenty of people who worship at the altar of the baby swing for its soothing and sleep-giving powers. If I had a dollar for every baby swing that was ordered on Amazon Prime in a fit of desperation between the hours of midnight and 5am, I would probably be able to afford a Mamaroo.

Written by: Kathleen

Big Mother is Watching You

As my child crests the two year mark, much of the gear I considered essential to his early days of life is collecting dust in the basement. The Rock n Play, once one of the first non-human things I would rescue in a fire (after the wedding album, but before the cat), is now wrapped in a garbage bag and wedged between a stack of broken suitcases and a combo TV/VCR. The car-seat canopy and Bjorn are packed away in a plastic bin, the Ergo has been lying on the floor of my station wagon for months, and even the BOB Revolution spends more time in the car port experimenting with new types of mold growth than treating a neighborhood arts festival like a monster truck rally. Yet one device has remained in consistent use since C was about 10 weeks old, shepherding us through growth spurts and illnesses and nap regressions like our own personal Eckhart Tolle of childhood sleep—our Motorola Digital Baby Monitor 3.5 Video MBP36.

Back in the days of yore when little Gen X’ers ran in packs through their cul-de-sacs, playing on trampolines, accepting candy from strangers, preparing their own genetically modified, high-fructose-corn-syrup-based dinners in the microwave and putting themselves to bed after Arsenio, parents didn’t have wireless video monitors with infrared screens and two-way microphones to assess whether their babies were asleep. At best they had primitive one-way walkie-talkies, which made up for what they lacked in features with impressive range, allowing parents to maintain a watchful ear over their offspring while getting uproariously drunk on their neighbor’s back deck. Nowadays, however, a parent without a video monitor might as well be family-bedding in a yurt in Montana five hundred miles from the nearest Trader Joe’s. At its heart, the video monitor is truly the foundation for modern parenting. After all, if you do not begin keeping tabs on how many times your infant rolls from back to front between midnight and 6AM now, how will you ever have the energy and lack of boundaries to secretly rewrite his college admissions essays for him when he’s eighteen?

Despite my own inclination to want to raise my children in an airbrushed version of the 1980s (yes to playing outdoors ‘til the sun goes down, no to neon Jams and trickle-down economics), I found that using a video monitor has helped me foster my son’s good sleeping habits and thus overall independence. My husband and I were never pushed to the necessary point of sleep-deprived delirium to implement a true Cry-It-Out method of sleep training, however we did start letting our son “fuss it out” beginning around 12 weeks of age, once we had established a consistent bedtime routine. Having the video monitor helped me determine whether he was truly red-faced crying like he’d been laid down to rest beside an active volcano or whether he was just rolling around squawking and griping like my great-uncle watching the 2008 Democratic presidential debates. The former required immediate intervention, a figurative hitting of the re-set button, whereas the latter meant that he was on track to be asleep within five minutes and it was time to unscrew the wine. As a frazzled first-time parent with the ability to spiral into a black hole of guilt for putting my beloved firstborn in his bouncer seat on the bathroom floor so I could pee lest he feel the slightest twinge of abandonment, the visual confirmation that fussing and whining was simply a part of his self-soothing mechanism provided tremendous comfort until the wine could take effect.

Additional features also contribute to the video monitor’s overall utility. Most of them now have night vision, so you can see whether your baby’s eyes are open or not, which is helpful when they begin to exhibit that adorable habit of “sleep-crying” at 90-minute intervals throughout the night at around 4 months of age (this is part of the dreadful 4-month sleep regression, and it too shall pass). The two-way microphone has been an invaluable contribution to scaring the crap out of my toddler every time he starts to climb out of his crib during naptime, even if it does guarantee that one day he’ll be telling his therapist about the omniscient, disembodied voice that ruled over his childhood and always seemed to have old episodes of Friday Night Lights playing in the background.

As all parents will learn, infant and toddler sleep is not a one-and-done kind of deal. Brag all you want about your six week-old sleeping 12 hours a night, but unless you have sold your soul to the Devil (and I wouldn’t blame you, and send me his email address if you have it), you are likely to encounter a few hiccups over the next few years, and by hiccups I mean that government mandated form of parental torture known as daylight savings time. Sleep habits evolve, regressions occur, new problems arise. Our parents’ generation may have gotten by just fine not knowing if that weird gurgling noise they heard coming from the baby’s room was the peaceful coo of their sleeping cherub or the onset of another round of rotavirus, but they were also allowed to drink martinis while breastfeeding and paid their teenage baby-sitters $1.50 an hour, so you know, we deserve our breaks where we can get them.

*As for specific video monitor brands, I don’t have any glowing recommendations. The 2013 version of the Motorola has crappy battery life and the power cord has become really loose at the point of connection with the receiver and thus falls out all the time and is impossible to reconnect in the dark, but it has survived over two years of being tossed about by a small child (and occasionally a grown adult who is exasperated by her infant son’s gift of six straight nights of “reverse cycling” to thank her for going back to work), so I should probably give it some credit. Let me know if you have an amazing video monitor you recommend, and then send it to me along with a second camera for the upcoming new addition and I promise to write a glowing review.

Written by: Kathleen

Without a video monitor, we never would have known that our child sleeps sitting up like an old man on the subway.

Books for Babies and Toddlers that Won’t Make Parents Question Their Early Life Choices

There are a gobillion children’s books out there, and sometimes it can be hard to know which ones will click with your child and which ones will drive you to pre-game story time with hard liquor just to avoid feeling your soul slip away when you begin the thirteenth consecutive read of the evening. As I’m always looking for new books for C so I can push my Amazon order over the requisite $35 to get free same-day delivery on Diaper Genie refills, I thought I would share a few of our greatest hits.

Great Books for Infants (ages 0-1 years):

1) Good Night Gorilla by Peggy Rathmann: This book has no words, so for delirious new parents it provides its own special form of torture. Just remember that babies don’t care about words, and the colors and dark contrasts make it a great first book to capture all two seconds of your newborn’s attention span.

2) On the Night You Were Born by Nancy Tillman: If you can read this one without tearing up a little bit, you’re officially dead inside. It’s a bit dense for young toddlers, but great when you need an extra dose of hormonal imbalance while nursing a newborn late at night.

3) Chicka Chicka Boom Boom by Bill Martin Jr and John Archambault: The rich colors make this one great for infants, although sleep-deprivation can turn it into an adult tongue-twister. My toddler is neutral on it—he likes that coconuts look like basketballs, but reciting the WHOLE alphabet is kind of a drag.

4) I Am a Bunny by Ole Risom and Richard Scarry: My son loves “Ima” like a best friend. He gets so delighted when he finds him on each page, as if it's a Where’s Waldo puzzle and not the only bunny in the book. Vibrant colors make this a great one for infants, too, and it’s so damn sweet that parents can’t help falling for it. Ima forever.

5) Good Night Moon by Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd: You’ll get at least six copies of this before your first child is even born. Generations of parents have been left wondering what exactly is in that bowl full of mush, and you're about to join them. Don’t fight it.

6) The Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd: As the wife of an only child, this book makes me twitchy. As the mother of a firstborn son, this is a sweet story of maternal devotion. Either way, the illustrations are lovely.

Great Books for Young Toddlers (age 1-2 years):

Toddlerhood is when your child’s penchant for obsessive repetition and exerting maniacal control over your desire to finish season 1 of True Detective really kicks in, so choose your bedtime books carefully, and keep in mind that The Cat in the Hat is like 60 effing pages long.

1) The Pout-Pout Fish by Deborah Diesen and Dan Hanna: If my kid hosted an award show for books, this one would win the Lifetime Achievement Award. Infants love the colors, toddlers love whatever random detail they choose to fixate on, and the language is twirly and fun for adults, too. Smooch!

2) A Book of Sleep by Il Sung Na: A recurring favorite in our house—not sure if it’s the inspiration for or a result of my son’s obsession with owls, but it’s part of the package. Not a hateful read for adults, either, so everyone wins. Except the tired owl.

3) Peek-a Who by Nina Laden: Another great read for budding owl enthusiasts, this is also the first book my son “read” by himself, because it’s that simple. Fast, fun, colorful, and it has a mirror at the end so it's great for reinforcing a toddler’s natural narcissism. Plus the book is small, so a good one for the diaper bag. (Also by Nina Laden are Grow Up and Who Loves You Baby?, each featuring the mirror at the end to foster the self-obsession long before baby’s first selfie stick).

4) First Words Board Book by Roger Priddy: These “first word” books are a necessary evil. Pre-talkers love them, but it can annoy the crap out of you that the picture of a duck doesn’t look like ANY duck you or your kid have ever seen. Can’t you people just once take a picture of a mallard? We own several versions of these and they are a useful if mind-numbing tool toward building that early vocabulary.

5) Pete the Cat: I Love My White Shoes art by James Dean, story by Eric Litwin: This book has everything: cats, colors, the words “oh no!”, and an important message about the pacifying effects of recreational marijuana use.

6) Little Blue Truck by Alice Schertle and Jill McElmurry: You can never go wrong with trucks and farm animals, and the illustrations are rich with the types of details toddlers love to obsess over. We have dedicated entire minutes before bedtime to discussing and confirming the existence of the stop sign on page 3.

7) The Diaper David Books by David Shannon: The Diaper David books are crudely drawn and maddeningly simple in their language, and my toddler is obsessed with them. For equally baffling reasons, I’ve come to love them, too. Oh Day-Day!

8) Hop on Pop and Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss: The entire Dr. Seuss canon is ripe for picking at the end of the second year. Hop on Pop is great for developing early reading skills as well as important life lessons, like don’t touch a cactus or play ball on a wall. Green Eggs and Ham can be a bit of a tongue-twister by the third or fourth consecutive read-through, so feel free to apply your own copy editing skills in the face of Seuss’ delightful affinity for redundancy.

9) Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus (and the other pigeon books) by Mo Willems: A series of books about a pigeon with authority issues—in some ways these books are so mind-numbingly simple you’ll wonder why you didn’t think of them, and in other ways they are so nuanced and complex you’ll be awestruck that your two year old, who frequently gets his finger stuck in his own nostril, can follow the humor. My son is currently obsessed, and I find myself thinking about the pigeon far more often than is probably healthy for a grown adult.

10) All Books by Sandra Boynton: Sandra Boynton is an evil genius and her books are literary crack for toddlers. You can’t go wrong with any one of them, but for verbosity’s sake I’ll include our favorites:

·         Moo, Baa, La La La!: The best thing about this book is that you can sing it to the tune of Lady Gaga's Bad Romance and it matches almost perfectly. Go ahead and try it—it will change your life.

·         The Going to Bed Book: This book is a delight for babies but maddening for hygenically-inclined adults. Why do they go back upstairs to exercise after their bath? WHY?

·         Blue Hat, Green Hat: It seems repetitive and pointless and has done nothing to help C learn any colors beyond blue and, in a real pinch, orange, but that damned turkey gets him every time.

·         Opposites: Unlike Blue Hat, Green Hat, this book has actually helped my son learn about opposites. $6.99 well spent.

Dishonorable Mentions:

1) Are You My Mother? By P.D. Eastman: This book gave me so much anxiety as a kid, I haven’t actually brought myself to read it to my son. Not a great read for working moms or those of us raised by them.

2) Guess How Much I Love You by Sam McBratney and Anita Jeram: Try saying “Little Nut Brown Hare” ten times fast and you’ll get my distaste. Throw in a hyper-competitive father and you’ve basically read this one. Pretty sure Big Nutbrown Hare was once the Runaway Bunny, because he’s got issues.

Written by: Kathleen

Co-Sleeping with the Enemy

These should really be called Co-catnappers, because the concept of true sleep is never realized while these apparatuses are in use. However, they do make the nighttime wakefulness a little less painful. I personally used the sidecar Arm’s Reach Mini Co-Sleeper. It fit nicely in the narrow space between my bed and closet door and came right up to the edge of the bed. My game plan for nighttime feedings was to move as little as possible. I had a diaper changing station set up on my nightstand and a nightlight to breastfeed and change diapers by. I wanted something that only required me to open one eye. There are numerous products on the market that fit these requirements—here are a few of the best:

#1 Pick: Arm’s Reach Mini Co-Sleeper: $156

·      ProJ Literally an arm’s reach away.

·      ProJ You can purchase extenders to match the height of your bed perfectly.

·      ProJ Good training for breaking down the Pack-N-Play in the future.

·      ConL When you are searching for somewhere to store it after 4 months, you may regret the          $39/month you put down. Make yourself have a second child to compensate.

#2 Pick: Graco Pack-N-Play Playard with Newborn Napper: $178

·      Pro: Two for one! Great value for something you can use during the first few months and              well into the toddler years.

·      Pro: Perfect for travel.

·      Pro: Price point is worth it when you factor in the length of time in use.

·      Con: Requires a bedroom with lots of space.

·      Con: You have to put your feet on the floor to retrieve your crying offspring.

#3 Pick: Fisher Price Rock ‘n Play Sleeper: $41.99 (see our full product review by Kathleen)

·      Pro: Best choice for the price and the purpose.

·      Pro: Provides an ideal incline position and snuggle factor.

·      Pro: Easily toted from room to room.

·      Con: If you have a pillow top mattress or a bunk bed, reaching for your little one in the                  middle of the night when your stomach muscles have turned to chia pudding can be quite            the uncomfortable venture.

#4 Pick: Baby Delight Snuggle Nest: $39.99

·      Pro: Perfect for those with little-to-no floor space.

·      Pro: If you’re nursing, you simply have to roll to one side to pop a boob in baby’s mouth.

·      Con: Can literally create a wedge between you and your spouse—which might be a positive for those of you living in fear of the 6-week postpartum doctor’s visit.

Please note that these gadgets have an extremely limited life, and consider that when you are deciding on the level of investment that you would like to make. How much would you spend on a pair of shoes if you were only going to wear them for 3-6 months max?

Written by: Alice

My Name is Baby, and I'm a Paci Addict

To some in today’s 30-mpg-on-the-highway-cross-over driving, old-world-vineyard preferring, grad-school-loan-repaying parenting community, suggesting you use a pacifier is the equivalent of telling you to formula-feed your baby while she sleeps on her stomach in a forward-facing car seat. I mentioned the word “binky” in our toddler music class last week, and every mom in the room turned to stare in panicked silence before openly contemplating whether someone should call Child Protective Services.

There are many concerns listed in the Googlesphere regarding the use of pacifiers, each ranking higher than the last on the “shrill harpy” scale of mommy-crazy. According to the most alarmist claims, your paci-sucking baby may never learn to talk, or he’ll have constant ear infections, or he’ll grow up to be a cross-dressing sociopath who tells his victims to put the lotion on the skin. For the sake of balanced reporting, I consulted the Mayo Clinic, my new online source of hypochondria ever since WebMD assured me that my frequent foot-muscle-spasms were definitely cancer. The Mayo Clinic is all, “some people use a pacifier and develop normally,” the way you might say that some people smoke a pack a day and live to be 102.  Then they go on to list the pros of pacifier use, which include soothing your baby when he cries, helping him learn to fall asleep, and reducing his risk of SIDS. The cons include nipple confusion, dependency, and crooked teeth—but only if your kid is still gnawing on his binky at age nine, and then let’s be honest, you’re already in trouble with the meth you’ve been cooking in the basement, you negligent ass-clown. Assuming you have a 12-step program for paci-addicts lined up before his second birthday, grab yourself a handful of rubber nipples from the hospital stash and go forth fostering an oral fixation. I promise it’s worth it.

As anyone who has read the first five pages and then skipped to the middle of The Happiest Baby on the Block will tell you, sucking is one of the “5 Ss” that, when applied in perfect order and coordination, will make your newborn baby stop crying for at least 90 seconds, thereby giving you time to call your husband and demand he cancel the rest of his business trip and fly home from New York immediately, no matter that it’s 11PM and he’s actually in San Francisco. Your baby can also be calmed by sucking on your boob or a bottle, but the former leads to cracked nipples and co-sleeping until college, and the latter to cashing in your 401(k) to pay for extra formula and future summers at fat camp. You may have to work at building the paci habit for a few weeks, but the dividends pay off in the form of faster self-soothing, earlier sleeping through the night, and more frequent passive-aggressive comments from your mother-in-law that confirm your suspicion that she thinks you’re a mediocre parent at best.

Of course, I can’t guarantee you that using a pacifier won’t turn your precious angel into a serial killer—my binky-loving son is just 19 months old, and so far his only questionable behavior toward animals is his stubborn insistence that cows say “boo.” However, I will say with anecdotal certainty that a healthy pacifier habit can stymy a dropped-apple-at-Whole-Foods tantrum, straighten a no-more-car-seat full-body arch, and reverse your baby’s pre-dawn wake-ups that, without fail, follow the nights you decide to open that third bottle of wine. I’m still new at this parenting thing, but in my opinion, extra sleep and avoiding a public scene in the vegan dairy aisle are totally worth the potential future cost of braces and home drug testing kits. And let’s be honest, if you’re still reading my recommendations after the first four posts, you’ll probably be paying for one of those things in a few years anyway.

Written by: Kathleen

Baby, I've got you covered

This particular “essential” gear recommendation may be a tad specific to my own experience. The Rock ‘n Play and a baby carrier have become universal requirements for proper bourgeois parenting—run a Facebook poll of your parent friends and the endorsements will come rolling in. Minimalist as you may plan to be while you begin your baby registry journey in the first trimester, you will still find yourself in seven months, awake at 2am on your third night home from the hospital, cluster-feeding your infant in one arm while signing up for Amazon Prime on your phone with the other so you can order the RNP to be delivered in the next five hours.

But a Carseat Canopy™, you ask? After all, you registered for several of those Aden & Anais muslin swaddlers, and your friends all assure you they are quite versatile, even if they do cost as much as your father’s entire four years of college. Why do you need yet another blanket, just because it has a heavy interior lining and Velcro straps?

One of the many things no one tells you about newborns is that they are easily overstimulated. I don’t mean that they get a little antsy at Chuck E. Cheese, I mean that turning on an overhead light can send their raw-pancake-batter nervous system into a manic frenzy. Some newborns are more susceptible than others—with zero data and only a vague recollection of reading this on BabyCenter, I think babies born on the early side of 40 weeks tend to have stimuli receptors that are more undercooked than their late-term counterparts. Maybe that’s just my excuse for why my son, born two weeks early, was a screaming ball of exposed nerve for most of his fourth trimester. He shrank from sunlight like a wrinkly-skinned mole, and if we had the audacity to have a ceiling fan going when the phone rang, he reacted like he was having dental surgery without anesthesia. My pre-baby visions of taking him on long walks in the stroller, admiring the fall foliage and opining on the meaning of life, were dashed by the reality of having an infant whose senses were frequently overloaded by the stripes on his crib sheet.

 Tiny infant C, snuggled deep in the Misty Mountains and dreaming of the Precious

The Carseat Canopy is a thick blanket that attaches to the handle of an infant carrier and creates a sensory deprivation chamber of darkness and calm. It’s the newborn equivalent of scented candles, a warm bubble bath, and Enya on surround sound. Once I discovered the utility of the Carseat Canopy, I was finally able to take little Gollum out of the house and into the world. Enveloped in the womb-like solace of his car seat, he would stop screaming and fall asleep a few minutes into a car ride, as long as I played David Sedaris podcasts on the stereo and never stopped at red lights. I could even take him for walks in the stroller, secure in knowing that no UV rays would pierce his paper-thin eyelids and trigger his Saw-like baby nightmares.

Thanks to the Carseat Canopy, by 12 weeks I had my baby on a schedule the Baby Whisperer would envy. A one-hour nap in the morning, driving around a city route that elegantly avoided all speed bumps, stop signs, and traffic lights; an afternoon nap in my arms as I made impressive progress on Candy Crush; and an early evening nap while I walked a three-mile loop around my neighborhood, a roadie in my hand and triumph in my heart.

Written by: Kathleen

The only six or seven strollers you will ever need

As far as I know, there are no serious ethical or political debates surrounding your stroller selection. Nobody makes a stroller out of recycled kitty litter and cornstarch, nor one that belts “Keep the Christ in Christmas!” from Halloween to the New Year. No, when it comes to picking a stroller, you’ll have to stick to the old-fashioned questions of, “How much do you want to spend on a stroller?” and “How much do you want to spend on the stroller you will buy after you realize that you cheaped-out on your first stroller and it’s a useless piece of crap taking up space in your mud room?”

It is an undeniable truth that you will own more than one stroller over the next 2-3 years. There is no single stroller that meets all of your child-transportation needs from birth to whenever you give up on preventing your precious cherub from emptying all the shelves at Barnes & Noble. You may tell yourself that back in the day your mom piled all seven of her kids into a buggy made from rusty pipes and a burlap sack and that’s good enough for your kid, too, but sooner or later you will crack and find yourself stalking other mothers at the zoo, peppering them with questions about their UPPAbaby Vistas while your heart fills with lust and envy. Do your soul-searching and your homework now and you will save yourself the heartache and a potential restraining order down the road.

In the beginning, you will need some sort of stroller that your infant carrier snaps into with relative ease. Baby-wearing is all well and good unless your newborn bundle of happiness is asleep in his car seat after 17 straight hours of crying and you’ve just arrived at CVS to buy adult diapers because you are still bleeding like a busted fire hydrant six weeks after delivery. When you are faced with the choice of disturbing your slumbering lovebug and triggering another four-day “witching hour” or drowning in your own postpartum sludge, you will appreciate being able to move the car seat from the car to the snap-n-go so that you can trot inside for your crotch pillows and a bag of Cheetos without disturbing baby's snuggly dreamland.

Depending on where you live and how active you pretend you will be during your maternity leave, you may also need an all-terrain or jog stroller. This is where I got duped by Big Stroller, believing I could navigate my urban, Craftsman-era neighborhood with a lightweight, easily collapsible Baby Jogger City Mini GT. Our house has exterior stairs to the front door and I have the upper arm-strength of a 98 year-old woman, so something under 15 lbs seemed a logical choice. It turns out that due to my neighborhood’s charm and strict tree-removal ordinances, our sidewalks look like a set from the movie Tremors, and the City Mini with a car seat attached is as stable as a double-decker bus in a hurricane. After a few stubborn months of carefully navigating around pinecones and acorns, I broke down and bought the BOB Revolution. The BOB is built on the same chassis as the M1 Abrams battle tank. It’s made of industrial steel and ox bone and it weighs as much as a Hyundai, but costs a little bit more. The BOB can scale the exploded ruins of post-apocalypse Manhattan or the curb at the botanical gardens without breaking your gait. Resistance is futile for all of you re-gentrified urban oasis dwellers. If your ZIP code has more than two independent coffee houses with free WiFi or one “public house” that brews beer on-premises and doesn’t serve nachos, you will be buying a BOB before your baby’s six-month photo shoot.

Finally, there are the pipe-and-burlap umbrella strollers of our youth. No frills, no brakes, no actual use, because by the time your kid is old enough to sit in one without sliding under the single-strap seat-belt, you’ll be on your iPhone ordering a double BOB from your hospital bed in Labor & Delivery while your husband sits by your side, mentally calculating the projected cost of college tuition for two and browsing suburban real estate listings on Trulia.

Written by: Kathleen

Pump It Up

Is that your nipple in a vacuum? The first thing to think about when considering which breast pump to get is that they all suck: both metaphorically and literally.  There isn’t a woman in the world that will tell you she loved pumping. It’s a means to an end and a necessary evil, unless you plan to go the formula or attachment parenting routes.

My device of pain: the Medela Freestyle Pump. Don’t let the name fool you, there is nothing freeing about this pump. However, it does offer the efficiency of dual pumping, making it easier to open a bottle of wine while your nipples are being abused. A bonus to this particular pump is the compact “engine” that can be clipped onto your stretchy pants, allowing you to do housework, complete spreadsheets, sit in a restroom stall, and walk on the treadmill while expelling the liquid gold for your little one. If you are like me and will need to pump between board meetings and chats around the water cooler, then this model will definitely pay for itself. You can pump in a public restroom or in your office with ease. Further, if you are a stay-at-home mom who is looking to increase supply or readying your stash for going back to work, you can strap this baby on while ordering your significant other around.

Tips for Pumping at Work:

·      Take a cooler or freezer bag. I really liked the Playtex Freeze To-Go Tote. Just throw it in the freezer in the evenings and it is ready to go, and you can leave it at your desk during the day. This helps you avoid having to use the staff refrigerator and screaming at Bill for thinking he was funny for using your breast milk in his coffee. #thestruggleisreal

·      If your employer isn’t progressive enough to provide a pump space and you don’t have a private office, finding a space to relax can be a challenge. When I got a new job and lost the privacy of my own office, I pumped in a chair in a public women’s restroom with my nursing cover. It made for an interesting first day of work as I introduced myself to colleagues and even the board chair in the restroom and then sat silently while I listened to them pee. 

·      If you are working 40+ hours a week and pumping at least 3 times a day then you will likely experience a decrease in production. No matter how hard that pump pulls your nipple, it can not match your little one’s natural sucker—and your body knows it! Fear not, there are great formulas out there that you can use to supplement AND this does not mean that your child is more or less likely to throw your cat out of a window one day. It is a natural side effect to the demand on your body. NOTE: Avoid using bigger bottles for pumping unless you have the production of a dairy cow otherwise it will just make you feel like a failure.

Tips for Milk Storage:

·      If you are stockpiling, then the freezer bags are ideal.  Freeze in varying amounts as baby’s needs will change, and you don’t want to have to defrost an 8-ounce bag when you really only need 6 ounces, thus forcing your husband to drink a “mommy Russian”. *Frozen breast milk, much like raw meat, should ideally be consumed within 24 hours of defrost.

·      For daily storage, Medela offers ample solutions, including lids with dials to indicate the date of pump. These are helpful for working moms who are trying to stay one day ahead: Friday’s pump = Monday’s bottles. Get bottles in various sizes to accommodate for increasing needs.

When/How to Start Pumping:

·      Going back to work post-baby:

o   I suggest you start the practice of pumping 2 weeks postpartum.

o   Pump right after you’ve fed the baby. This will tell your body to increase supply and help to build your stash right away. This also works whether you are doing timed or demand-based feedings.

o   Use some of this stash to start introducing the bottle after the first month so that your babe will be well versed in bottle feeding by the time you are forced, after a quick 3-month maternity leave, to drop her off at daycare.

·      Staying at home with baby:

o   You can start as early as you want, but you likely won’t feel any real pressure to build a stash right away.

o   Do some intermittent pumping after the first month. This will allow you to build up a modest amount that can be pulled out of the freezer in the event that you get the flu or want to go see a movie.

o   For the more social mommy who wants to resume date nights and regular doctor’s visits, I suggest routinely pumping post-feedings starting after the first month. 

Written by: Alice

Rock 'n Play Me All Night Long

First off, you should know that every single piece of baby gear you buy will come with multiple warnings in a variety of languages that inform you that any alteration or misuse of this product will undoubtedly kill your baby. At first these warnings are terrifying, but worry not—eventually you will grow numb to neon yellow tags that threaten the spontaneous combustion of your offspring, and you will no longer tremble at the sight of the all-caps labels on your stroller barking at you like an irritable French waiter, “Mise en Garde! Mise en Garde you stupid American filth!” Indeed, soon enough you will be recklessly dressing your toddler in baggy pajamas and putting your lukewarm coffee in the cup-holder of your BOB accessory bar, but in the early weeks you will be bullied into compliance. Thus when I tell you right now that letting your newborn spend the night in the Fisher Price Rock ‘n Play will save you from openly empathizing with terror suspects in Guantanamo, you will not listen. Babies must sleep on their backs on a hard, flat surface, you will think with the smugness of someone who has never put kitty litter in the coffee maker. That’s what both the Mayo Clinic and all of the other first-time moms on the What to Expect message board say, and by God that is how your baby will sleep, no exceptions.

Except that newborn babies won’t sleep flat on their backs on a hard surface because newborn babies are not preternaturally suited for a post-apocalyptic nomadic civilization or a third-world prison. Oh sure, maybe in the hospital your little bug slept in that plastic fish tank like a champ, but only because he was knocked out from the Fentanyl drip you got when you still thought you could handle a natural childbirth. Once home, your baby will only sleep in one of two places: your arms, or the Rock ‘n Play (aka the “RNP”, as those twats on the message board will refer to it after they enjoy three straight nights of cluster feeding).

The RNP is firm enough to mimic a prison cot, and it gives you no choice but to put your baby on his back, however, unlike on that slab of concrete they call a crib mattress, your baby will actually sleep in it. The curved basket imitates your own warm embrace, and it rests your baby at a slight elevation, which helps with colic and reflux and all of the other made-up reasons newborns scream non-stop for 4-8 hours a day. Plus his spastic muscle control will cause the RNP to rock back and forth, lulling him into that mythical “deep” sleep that lasts until the moment you put the shampoo in your hair.

Go ahead and register for the RNP, telling yourself you will only use it to lay your baby in while you read to him from the New York Times or sing him Italian operas. It will be there waiting for you after you drag the Arm’s Reach co-sleeper out to your front lawn and light it on fire, and it won’t even say “I told you so.” It will just cuddle your baby close, swaying slightly as if jostled by a warm summer breeze, while you weep quietly into your cold cup of litter-coffee and wonder if Guantanamo might not be so bad this time of year.

Written by: Kathleen

Our first morning at home, marveling at the power of the RNP and wondering why my coffee tastes like cat pee.

Our baby carriers, ourselves

If you wasted your college degree on an English major like most people I know, you will quickly pick up on the overarching theme of my baby-gear recommendations: Sleep. How, where, when, how long, why not, and dear God please give me some serious but not life-threatening illness like Ebola so that I am forced to spend a few days alone in the hospital where I can rest. Most of the gear you will need in the early weeks of your child’s life is meant to either help you score extra sleep, or prevent you from getting pooped on. Babies don’t actually need much to survive the first month—food, shelter, hugs—but you require these gadgets so that the postpartum hormones and sleep deprivation don’t drive you so bat-shit crazy that you try to gouge your eyeballs out with a nasal bulb.

A baby carrier won’t actually help you sleep, at least not directly, but if you’re lucky the right one will cause your baby to fall asleep, thereby allowing you some free time to make a sandwich or fold laundry or let the dog inside because it’s suddenly occurred to you that he’s been in the back yard for three days and has started hunting squirrels and growing his own vegetables. For your baby, the carrier is the next best thing to returning to the womb—she hears your heartbeat, feels your warmth, and is gently bounced to sleep by the rhythm of your footsteps as you search the house for the corkscrew.

There are roughly 40 billion types of baby carriers on the market, and each one comes embedded with a parenting philosophy and a personal statement about your value as a citizen of the world. The Moby Wrap, for example, says, “I know how to find tutorials on YouTube and I have decent-sized hips.” The Ergobaby conveys the message, “A lot of my friends went to law school, but some sold out early and got an MBA.” I own both of these carriers, but the one my son lived in pretty much non-stop from weeks 4-12 was the Baby Bjorn, which is more of a, “My colicky demon-beast is finally asleep after three hours of crying so take your hysteria about hip dysplasia and shove it up your baby-wearing ass.”

Yes, like everything from produce to pets, baby carriers are a hot-button issue among people without any real survival-related life problems. But all that really matters when it comes to choosing a carrier is, 1) will your baby sleep in it; and, 2) can you get it on and get your baby into it by yourself, preferably with one hand so you don’t have to put your mug of Irish coffee down to adjust the straps. The Bjorn checked both of these boxes for me in the early days, whereas the Ergo became much more useful a few months down the road, and the Moby makes a pretty nice dog bed.

Try a few carriers out and find the one that works for you, regardless of what it says about your political leanings or property taxes. Borrow a friend’s baby, or better yet, use a feral cat to recreate the appropriate weight and degree of cooperation you can expect from your soon-to-be bundle of joy and fulfillment. If you can get the cat to fall asleep before it pisses all over you, you’ve found your carrier, and make sure to add bonus points if you managed not to spill your drink.

Written by: Kathleen