Life’s full of tough choices

Okay, it’s 2 a.m. and I’m done with my shift. Should I:

a) Go home right now and get some much-needed sleep like a good little mama, or

b) Make a detour and load up on a bunch of greasy White Castle cheeseburgers. Then go home and get some much-needed sleep, etc., etc.

Hmm. I think we all know where this is going, don’t we?

I guess it could be worse: I used to crave chocolate Yoo-Hoo and corndogs (though not necessarily at the same time, I should point out). I sincerely wish that I craved raw carrots a bit more often and junk food a lot less. Or, barring that, that White Castle would close at a sane hour so I wouldn’t be tempted. (Though please note: I have been an exceedingly obedient preggo puff with my gestational diabetes diet, but an occasional treat helps keep me sane.)

Oh White Castle. You burning beacon of midnight bacon grease. You torrid temptress of attainted onion rings. My innards hate you, but you own a little piece of my soul.

Eating not-so-good in the neighborhood

Have you all read Linda Blackford’s article about the mother who was discriminated against for breastfeeding her baby in an Applebees restaurant? I heard about the incident early yesterday, and the more I read about it the madder I get. Specifically, I’m referring to the outrageous comments directed towards Brooke Ryan and breastfeeding in general. And not just in the Kentucky.com comments section—this has garnered quite a bit of publicity on several message boards and blogs.

I’ll try to keep this brief (my OB says I shouldn’t get my blood pressure up too much), but here are my responses to a few of the issues raised:

—Many commenters have accused Mrs. Ryan of being publicly indecent or “letting her boobs hang out” while nursing. People. Have you even looked at the picture or read the whole article? She was facing a wall in a secluded booth, and even when she’s nursing while facing a Herald-Leader photographer, you can’t see a thing. I hope to heaven my daughter is this “immodest” someday. Nope, sounds to me like somebody in the restaurant could tell that a breastfeeding was happening and just couldn’t stomach the concept of a hungry baby having lunch too. Cry me a river.

Anyhow, this is not an issue about modesty. There is some serious cultural disconnect when women who want to feed their babies are chastised for being immodest, and yet you go to the mall and see rack after rack of outrageously trampy clothes marketed toward tweens and young teens. Or when a mother is told not to breastfeed at Victoria’s Secret because..what, other customers might be offended by the sight of a breast? In that store?

The message seems clear to me: breasts are okay as long as they’re for sex, but heaven forbid you use them for their actual intended purpose. I mean, is Applebees offering blankets to cover up women who come in wearing low-cut tops? Because I’m certainly not seeing that kind of real estate on Brooke Ryan. She’s not an exhibitionist and wasn’t exposing her breasts to everyone in the restaurant. She’s just feeding her baby, and from all accounts was trying to be as discreet as possible.

—Moms should never be asked to feed their babies in a bathroom. I don’t eat in a bathroom and I certainly wouldn’t expect a baby to eat there either. In fact, moms should never have to leave a public situation and make their babies wait to be fed.

And suggesting that she use a breast pump is absurd too: lactating breasts are going to let down with milk when it’s time for the baby to feed, whether you have a bottle of expressed milk ready or not. And it’s not convenient (or often even possible) to lug around a cooler of chilled breast milk. Fortunately, mothers have a far better solution: breasts.

—Many (including the enlightened Mr. Scanlon) have suggested that Mrs. Ryan only carries a copy of breastfeeding legislation with her because she has an agenda. Well small wonder she carries a copy, given how many women are harassed and humiliated for exercising their legal right to feed their babies. Way to stand up for families, Mike. She wasn’t out looking for a big lawsuit—in fact, she’s not seeking any money from Applebees at all—she just wanted to have lunch with her family. Besides, for all the women who are educated enough to know their rights and brave enough to stand their ground, there are many more who allow themselves to be intimidated, so I’m glad to see some attention given to this issue.

The plain fact is that mothers have a right to breastfeed in any location–public or private–that they have a right to otherwise be. That includes Applebees, so let’s not have any hairsplitting about whether the restaurant is “in public” or not.

And I find it shocking that every Applebees employee involved in this incident knew the law, and yet attempted to break it anyway in order to appease one squeamish couple. Since when does one uptight restaurant patron overrule state law? We need a law with some teeth to it—some kind of fine or other punishment for businesses who try to break this law. Otherwise it seems clear that businesses will continue to try and get away with this sort of behavior.

But in the meantime, here’s my thought: if you can’t stand the sight of a mother feeding her child, perhaps Applebees can provide blankets as cover-ups—for your head.

Cloth? Disposable? How about both in one diaper?

Oh internets, how I love you.

I had planned to use disposable diapers for the first month after my baby’s born (until she can grow into her cloth diapers). I didn’t want to do that, but I just can’t afford to buy an entire supply of cloth diapers for newborns.

I was chatting online with a friend of mine about this quandary (be nice to the Earth vs. go flat broke), and she told me about this nifty little invention that’s gaining popularity on the West Coast—namely, gDiapers–a sort of hybrid between cloth diapers and disposables. And, awesome friend that she is, she up and sent me a starter kit.

These gDiapers are a weird critter, to be sure, but the concept is so logical I wonder why nobody thought of this before now. Essentially, there are three parts: the keeper outer pant with velcro closures, a nylon liner (also a keeper) that snaps into the outer pant and looks sort of like a shower cap, and the flushable refill (looks like a big honking maxi pad), which fits into the liner.

The outer pant is made of cotton with a little spandex for stretch, and is incidentally as cute as it can be (I have it in five different colors). I’ve read on several message boards that the outer pant also can be used as a cover for regular cloth diapers, for families that like to switch back and forth.

The nylon liner usually stays in after a wet diaper, but will probably get funky with a poopy diaper. But since it’s made of nylon, you can rinse it under the bathtub tap and it will air-dry in about 15 minutes and be ready to use again. As part of my admittedly non-scientific testing regimen, I squirted a liner with Hershey’s chocolate syrup and put a spoonful of salsa in there just for good measure, squished it around a bit, then rinsed it under the tap. The food came off without staining and the liner was dry by the time I finished reading Go, Dog. Go! to the Sprog. However long that takes.

And now, the best part: the flushable refill. The filling is made with sustainably harvested fluffy wood pulp, mixed with super-absorbent sodium polyacrylate crystals (the same stuff you put in your garden dirt to help it retain water). Now, I have found websites that claim sodium polyacrylate is evil, poisonous stuff, and I’ve also found websites that say it’s totally benign, and I admit that that is the extent of my knowledge on the subject. You will have to make up your own mind on that count. My thought is: don’t let your kids eat their own dirty diapers, and everyone will be a lot happier anyway.

So anyway, here’s the coolest thing about the flushable refill: just like the name says, you can flush it down the toilet. Should flush it, in fact, if it’s a dirty diaper. That way the feces will be processed through the sewage treatment system (plus, no stinky diaper pail, which is niiiiice). If a diaper is just wet, you can still flush it, but you can also just throw it in the garbage or onto the compost heap. There’s a nifty time-lapse video on the site that shows the gDiaper completely biodegrading after 53 days. Very cool, considering a disposable diaper takes at least 500 years to do the same.

The price is not too bad either: The flushable refills are about as expensive as Huggies, and the keeper outer pants aren’t too bad, either. You can buy them on the company website if you’re all out of options, but Wild Oats here in Lexington sells them too (and they were on sale for much cheaper than the company website prices).

Of course, in the interests of fairness, I should say that these don’t work out for everyone. I talked to one local mom who had tried these with her son, and she said they tended to get weighed down in the front when he wet himself. This echoes several comments I read on parenting message boards, so obviously a snug fit is a big factor in how much you will like these diapers (and possibly, the gender of the child, since boys pee more in the front of the diaper, and girls pee down in the middle). Some people also said they were leaky, while others never had a problem with this; many people on the message boards stressed the importance of doubling up on the liners when using at night. And some people said that their toilets got clogged up when disposing of the gDiapers, so beware if you have a notoriously ineffective flush or use a septic system.

Anyhow, forewarned is forearmed and all that, so I’m going to give these diapers a try and hope they’re as cool as they sound. Either way, I’ll keep you all posted about them. In the meantime, here are a few instructive links:

The gDiapers home page

An article comparing and contrasting gDiapers and 7th Generation diapers

A brutally honest mommy board discussion about gDiapers

Has anyone else tried gDiapers? Any thoughts or tips?

Book review: “Edwardo: The Horriblest Boy in the Whole Wide World”

I was going to post this on Monday, but the book is so cool I just couldn’t wait. So here, have a quick review:

Prolific children’s author and illustrator John Burningham has come up with that rarest gem in his new book: a story that is simple and engaging for children, but also enormously instructive for parents.

In Edwardo: The Horriblest Boy in the Whole Wide World, the main character is an ordinary little boy who is sometimes noisy, rude, rough, and mean to other kids. As all little boys are.

But the problem is when the adults in his life try to pigeonhole him based on that sometimes thoughtless behavior:

Occasionally Edwardo was not very nice to animals and would chase the cat.

“You are a cruel boy, Edwardo, chasing the cat. You are the cruelest boy in the whole wide world.” Edwardo became more and more cruel.

Pretty soon Edwardo starts conforming to those low expectations, and becomes progressively ruder, messier, dirtier, meaner, etc., until one day the adults all declare, “Edwardo, you really are THE HORRIBLEST BOY IN THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD.”

Things might have continued in that vein, but one day someone praises Edwardo instead:

Cruel Edwardo was waiting for the dog with a bucket of water. He threw it over the dog as it came by.

“Thank you so much, Edwardo, for washing my muddy dog for me. You are so good with animals.”

And so Edwardo was asked to clean and look after everybody’s pets.

Now, I couldn’t find the illustration online, but the next page shows Edwardo smiling and looking after a bunch of animals. And you know why, don’t you? Little kids are desperate for approval and attention, and if they can’t get the first, they’ll go for the second with gusto. But on the whole, they’d rather have the approval too.

Kids take an adult’s judgment very seriously. If you tell a kid he’s always messy, can never listen, doesn’t share, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Fortunately things turn out okay for Edwardo.

The beginning of the book is all about how adults magnify his once-in-a-while bad behavior, but in the second half it’s the opposite: other adults single out his accidental acts of kindness and praise him for them. And Edwardo eats it up.

So now, even though he’s still a normal little boy (read: still a little rude, dirty, noisy, cruel, etc.), Edwardo is really “THE NICEST BOY IN THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD.”

What a wonderful reminder for us parents and teachers to be mindful of what we say to children. Because whether they’re obeying or not, they’re certainly listening.

Not dead yet

Or in the hospital giving birth. Just finishing up this big old project at work is all.

But fear not, the end is in sight! Check back tomorrow sometime for some brand spanking new blog content, cross my heart (unless I really do go into labor).

In the meantime, have a laugh at this:

Woman sells a pack of Pokemon cards for $142.51 on eBay.

There’s nothing special about the cards themselves, but the accompanying story in the Item Description box is comedy gold.

A small snippet from the description:

LOT OF POKEMON CARDS THAT MY KIDS TRIED TO SNEAK BY ME

I’m selling a bunch of Pokemon cards. Why? Because my kids sneaked them into my shopping cart while at the grocery store and I ended up buying them because I didn’t notice they were there until we got home. How could I have possibly not noticed they were in my cart, you ask? Let me explain.

You haven’t lived until you’ve gone grocery shopping with six kids in tow. I would rather swim, covered in bait, through the English Channel, be a contestant on Fear Factor when they’re having pig brains for lunch, or do fourth grade math than to take my six kids to the grocery store.

Yeah, I can see how that would be a nice little slice of punishment, right there. The funniest part about it is that if you go to her blog, she says she got 18,417 page hits today and three job offers.

I have to wonder what the job offers were for. On further consideration, though, if you can wrangle six small children at the grocery store and the worst thing that happens to you is buying an extra Pokemon pack, you can probably do anything.

So, who’s got a grocery store/going out in public with the kids horror story? You know you do.

The enormity of the situation…

“That’s no moon…It’s a space station!”
—Obi Wan Kenobi, Star Wars

I’d like to say I’m one of those women who are still tiny and sylph-like even when they’re only a few weeks from giving birth. I’d like to say that, but I’d be lying through my teeth. Because I’m huge. Even my maternity clothes are starting to get tight in the belly, so I’ve requested that my husband get 2XL t-shirts when he goes in for pheresis at the Blood Center. And rolling over in bed at this point requires me to get a good start, or I’ll run out of momentum and end up stuck on my back with my legs waving in the air like an unfortunate turtle.

Even the Sprog has noticed, as evidenced by this recent exchange:

He was sitting on my knees and playing horsey as I held his hands and bounced him around. After a while, yelling “Giddyup!” kind of lost its shine, so I decided to liven things up.

“Okay, now you’re Han Solo, and you’re flying the Millennium Falcon away from the evil Empire!”

He squealed with glee and made spaceship noises as I zoomed him back and forth on my knees (he also graciously said I could be Princess Leia). Then a few minutes later, he said, “Mommy, now I am Luke Skywalker, and I will shoot the Death Star!”

“Alright,” I said gamely. “Who am I?”

He leaned forward, gently patted my giant preggo belly, and said, “Mommy, you’re the Death Star.”

 

Attack of the eight-legged freaks!

I am now ready for summer to be over.

Not because of the heat (though that’s a factor); it’s the freaking spiders.

Now, I am not generally a squeamish girl. Snakes, bats, bugs, sharks, rodents, all that stuff I have a healthy respect for, but they don’t really scare me. But something about spiders renders me a gibbering heap of co-dependent terror that would make Gloria Steinem gag.

I mean, good grief, look at the way they move. And they could hide in my shoes, or skitter up my leg or who knows what. IQ, college education, rational thought are nothing before the knowledge that, somehow, it might get on me.

So I try to stay out of situations where I might come into contact with the nasty little beasties, but here’s the problem: I have to come home after work. And the spiders are always waiting for me. It makes me think of an old Far Side cartoon, where two spiders have strung a web across the bottom of a playground slide, and one of them is saying to the other, “I tell ya, if we pull this one off, we’ll eat like kings!”

Apparently, the spiders at my house are trying to net themselves a pregnant woman, which is why I dread coming home after my shift. On the nights where I work really late, I always make sure to bring home a first-edition paper so I can wield it like the fist of a vengeful god on the little suckers that dare to spin their webs across the hedges flanking my front walkway.

But nobody ever said spiders were smart—no matter how many I kill, they just keep coming back, night after night, and nothing I can think of (short of cutting down all the hedges) seems to work. Well, there’s one thing: I bought a special spray can of Terro Spider Killer, which would work GREAT except for one small problem: there’s a huge picture of a big scary spider on the front of the can.

I am so ashamed to put this in print, but here goes: my fear of spiders is such that I get kind of nervous even holding the can of Terro just because of that picture. So more often than not, I don’t have the nerve to napalm the front walkway and thus ensure a few nights of spider-free passage. So the can just sits there in the pantry gathering dust until I scare myself half to death with it while hunting for the Windex. Brilliant.

I’d like to say I wasn’t always this bad about spiders, but the truth is, I used to be worse. Let me count the ways:

As a child, the mere sight of a spider was enough to send me into shrieking hysterics.

As a teenager, I very nearly did not go on a mission trip to Costa Rica because of all the giant, man-eating arachnids I was sure I’d encounter. I did end up going, but only because my grandmother sewed me a lightweight mesh bag that was big enough to fit my sleeping bag in; every night I’d crawl into my sleeping bag, then zip the mesh “bug bag” closed around me, and was thus able to get some marginally peaceful rest. The one real tarantula I saw on the whole trip was petrified of me, its fuzzy little orange knees practically knocking together as it cowered in its mudbank hole.

And one of the top five most terrifying moments of my life happened just a few years ago: I was sitting on the loveseat reading a Stephen King novel late one night when I heard a loud “thunk” next to me. I looked, and right there, inches from my left hand, was an enormous spider that had dropped out of the heating vent right over my head. I let out a bloodcurdling scream that would have made Janet Lee weep with envy. Then I knocked that spider into next week with a hardback copy of Hearts in Atlantis.

I’m not totally immobilized by the sight of a spider any more (though I steadfastly continue to reconnoiter the area over my head before sitting down), but I’d still rather not have the creepy little critters around. Yes, yes, I know, they’re terribly beneficial to the earth, and we’d be overrun with 30 squillion bugs by next week if there were no spiders, but I swear I could care less. They can go be beneficial to the food chain anywhere else on the planet as long as they stay off my front walkway at night. And they’d better, too, because I’m ready for them now.

Especially since I taped over the scary label on the Terro spray.

Discuss: Any other arachnaphobes out there? If not, what’s the one thing that scares you to death, no matter how silly or irrational? Share your stories! (That way I won’t feel so dumb.)

Edited to add: In response to a concerned e-mail, I think I should clarify that I am not personally spraying any spider killer whilst pregnant. Mr. Chapman gets that dubious honor. But last summer, I was spraying that stuff like no tomorrow (first making sure that the Sprog was safely out of range, of course).

Back to school

Folks, it’s that time of year again: Fayette County Public Schools start back on Monday, and I’d be willing to bet your kid has a shopping list of supplies that will make you weep. Not just because it’s going to be an expensive trip (more and more these days, I’m afraid), but because the school supplies aisle of Wal-Mart this week is going to be like a scene out of Lord of the Flies.

I’m assuming most of you have no desire to be brawling with other moms over the very last Lisa Frank unicorn folder, so give us all some tips: how do you save time, stress, and money when shopping for school supplies? And where in Lexington have you found to be a good place to shop for supplies?

One good idea is to check out price comparison sites like Go! Nico! Fish!, since they have a lot of good coupon codes and such, and can give you good price comparisons for shopping in brick and mortar stores.

Also, if you have a child about to enter school for the first time, what are your tips for keeping the transition smooth? I admit to having a deeply personal interest in this question, since the Sprog is going to start preschool in a few weeks. He’s terribly excited; just about left claw-marks in the floor when we tried to get him to leave after the first visit there, but I wonder how he’ll be when it comes time for us to leave him there. Any ideas for eliminating the potential drama?

I can has cheezburger?

Well, this is not so bad after all.

I’ve just begun my second day of the Joy of Gestational Diabetes Diet—complete with Happy Fun Finger Stick Time—and it’s honestly not as terrible as I had thought it would be.

Oh, by the way: I have gestational diabetes, as I found out last week. I thought I was horribly abnormal, since my What to Expect book said only 1-2% of all pregnant women get it, but the dietician who taught my gestational diabetes management class said it was more like 7-14%. And it’s not like I didn’t know this was coming, anyway. I have a family history of Type I diabetes, and let’s not mince words here, I’m kinda fat.

After I found out I had it, I had visions of sugarplums the Atkins diet dancing in my head: lots of eggs and cheese and vegetables, but no bread or potatoes ever ever ever. We went to McDonald’s for dinner that night and I ordered a big old salad with grilled chicken, bravely asking them to hold the croutons. I glumly surveyed the repast on the way home, and very nearly made a break for it at the stop light with my husband’s Quarter Pounder with cheese meal. But I’m slow and weak, and they probably would have run me down like a wildebeest on the veldt. So salad it was. YAY RABBIT FOOD.

Thankfully, the actual dietary restrictions turned out to be a lot more liveable. I can actually have a Quarter Pounder with cheese for dinner, as long as I don’t eat many of the fries (though I need to limit sodium intake too). They want me to eat a bunch of carbs—they’re important to baby’s growth—but it’s very tightly controlled how many grams per meal. Fine with me, as long as I know what I’m dealing with and can plan accordingly. And it’s a good thing I don’t have much of a sweet tooth—I usually go for the salty/greasy comfort food rather than ice cream or cookies.

It also helps that my garden is in full swing right now, with a bumper crop of tomatoes, zucchini, yellow squash, peppers, and pretty soon, cantaloupes. And there’s nothing I love more than fresh strips of raw red bell pepper. I’ve been to Wendy’s several times in the last couple days, too, because they have really good options for their side items, like side salads and chili.

So…I think I can do this. I will do it, because I want my baby to be healthy, not to mention my own self. But I forsee a whole lot of scrambled eggs in my immediate future.

Discuss: Has anyone else here had gestational diabetes? How did you cope with it? Any favorite low-carb recipes?

P.S. With apologies to the popular lolcats website for the title of this post.