I'll Be Right Back, a parenting newsletter, issue 12
Welcome to I’ll Be Right Back, a new parenting newsletter that combines the fear-mongering of BabyCenter with the practical tips of a vegan model’s parenting blog. This is issue 12, published June 24, 2016.
Some nice people have asked how they can share this stuff via social media. I'm posting all the main essays to Medium, which should give you nice tweetable/Facebookable links. Also, the newsletter's archives are here.
There’s new stuff to buy for every stage of having a kid, it turns out! When we moved Alice into a toddler bed, we’d never had a video baby monitor before, but we decided we wanted to know what she was doing in her room once she was freed of the crib. (To be honest, we could just use our ears: A lot of the time she is literally standing by the door banging on a toy drum.) But the Nest Cam went on sale, and Kevin has this sweet dream that one day, when we have a house, he and I will sit outside on our patio and drink while our kids sleep inside and we monitor the on our phones, so we bought it and installed it in what is currently Alice’s bedroom and will eventually be both kids’ bedroom. The Nest comes with a free 30-day trial of a continuous recording feature called Nest Aware. It keeps your video history, so you can go back and look at it, and it sends you alerts on your phone if it senses motion in the room. Once the trial ends, it costs $10 a month. And the main reason we will probably get suckered into paying the $10 a month — a price that will probably never come down, knowledgeable former colleagues tell me — is that the premium feature also lets you make VIDEO CLIPS! The video clip feature has allowed me to convince myself that the Nest allows us to access extremely important, intimate life moments that we would otherwise never have even known about. For instance: I always kind of wondered what Alice did when she wakes up in the morning. Experience leads me to believe that toddlers rarely turn over and go back to sleep for awhile. I had no actual proof that this was true, however, until I watched some video of Alice waking up in the morning. She does not wake up like an adult. She goes from deeply asleep to tossing and turning for one second to sitting fully upright and leaping joyfully out of bed. (Laura June introduced me to this phenomenon.)
Witness it! It’s also kind of fascinating to watch footage of yourself interacting with your kid. I never realized how tired I look in the morning, or how often I lift up my shirt and scratch my pregnant belly, until I watched myself going into Alice's room after she's awake. (Nest provides really good encouragement to get yourself some more attractive sleepwear, by the way.) I think there was one moment where I rubbed my eyes for like a full 15 seconds while Alice, fresh as the morning dew, just stood smiling up at me. But I also got to see myself being unexpectedly tender in a moment that I would otherwise never even have realized occurred. It was so nice to see, even though I looked so bad.
Other
— One of the funnest parts of bottle-feeding is worrying it’s going to make your kid obese. It turns out bottle size may be a bigger factor in this than whether breastmilk or formula is in the bottle. Full study here if you have access to such things through your institution or whatever; I have the PDF so email me if you want it, but a few tidbits from the study:
“Infants using larger bottles were more likely to be male.”
“The hypothesis that the mode of feeding (ie, the bottle) rather than the milk type is responsible for differences in weight gain between formula-fed and breast-fed infants is supported by longtitudinal research showing that infants fed only human milk by bottle gain more weight than breastfed infants."
I like this study because it does not place blame on moms’ bodies, or really on moms at all (beyond the fact that moms feed their babies). It also gives you an extremely obvious solution of what to do if you’re worried about this: Try smaller bottle sizes, observe your baby while he/she eats to see if he/she is actually hungry, don’t urge them to finish if they don’t want to, then give them more if they are still hungry.
Still haven’t forgiven the otherwise wonderful Baby 411 for referring to formula as “Coke,” BTW! (No seriously. This shit is baffling in what is otherwise a science-based excellent reference book, and I can't believe someone hasn't shamed the authors into removing it yet.)
— "Without the EU, there would be no Gruffalo: Axel Scheffler on the prospect of Brexit." Semi-related: The books written by Julia Donaldson and illustrated by Scheffler are my absolute faves to read aloud. The meter is so beautiful and the stories are so good. Today I read Room on the Broom to Alice immediately followed by The Pout-Pout Fish and it was like reading, IDK, Shakespeare and then some kid’s poem in Highlights.
And Julia Donaldson has talked about this! A site called History for Kids did an interview with her. From that:
History For Kids: I noticed that sometimes you use iambic pentameter (e.g. in bits of the Gruffalo), and I wondered how strict you are with yourself regarding meter?
Julia Donaldson: I am more strict about the musical rhythm than about a strict meter such as iambic pentameters. I'm thinking of the number of beats in a bar - which could be a mixture of crotchets, quavers, triplets or whatever. This is partly because I was a songwriter long before I turned my hand to books.
History For Kids: Do you have a favourite line or couplet that you have written?
Julia Donaldson: I like the ending of The Snail and the Whale:
And they sang to the sea as they all set sail
On the tail of the grey-blue humpback whale.
And I'm quite pleased with the section in my new book Tabby McTat which describes all his "Things to Do":
Like washing Prunella and pouncing on Pat
And hiding the car keys under the mat
And keeping the newspapers nice and flat
And giving the pens an occasional bat
And nibbling this, and nibbling that
— “They are increasingly seen as a way for parents to encourage their offspring to take control of their affairs.” (LOL I’m imagining Alice’s planner. It would be nothing but page after page of twisted pieces of washi tape.)
— Two thirty-something dudes do a podcast about The Babysitters' Club and I can't wait to listen to it (learned about it from Lenny Letter this week).
— Nice news: Watching Daniel Tiger actually helps kids develop social and emotional skills; bad news: The greatest parent "In order for kids to benefit from watching the show, their regular TV-watching experiences had to be accompanied by frequent parent-child conversations about media content.” Um, what if I have learned all the songs and occasionally sing “It’s okay to feel sad sometimes” back at her? Does that release me from ever having to watch the Love Day episode again?
Thanks for subscribing! I'll be back again next week. If somebody forwarded this to you, please subscribe via this link. I'm on Twitter @laurahazardowen or email at laurahazardowen@gmail.com.