Go Get Your Jacket

How I lost me hand

I'm not sure I'd even be running the Maclaren recall story at this point if I didn't happen to have this picture of JennL's William post-tragic amputation, but I do. Surely, though, everyone who needs to know that the famously well-designed, attractive, and sturdy British umbrella  strollers can AMPUTATE THE FINGERTIPS OF SMALL CHIILDREN probably does know already. Not that we would have minded knowing this before ours actually did attempt to AMPUTATE OUR SON'S FINGERTIP that time last summer. We assumed user error, not international children's lifestyle brand conspiracy of silence.

So far they are reporting all of eleven incidents, which I suppose might be twelve incidents if it had occured to us to report ours. We didn't, and actually it's a bit hard to figure out if ours would count-- the articles implicate a "folding mechanism" and seem to imply that the children stuck their fingers into the hinge while a parent folded the famously foldable stroller. Ours occured while Kenton was snapping it open for Avi, who was in a bad mood (which did not improve after his AMPUTATION) and didn't feel like walking. This actually seems like a likelier accident (Avi was eager to get into the stroller and reached out for it while it was still being readied for him) but nobody seems to be talking about any deadly unfolding mechanism slicing children to ribbons. We will get the hinge-cover kit, of course, now that we know. 

In the meantime, if you are foolhardy enough to continue to use your Maclaren without the patch kit you may want to grab one of those hooks out of the post-Halloween mark-down bins. Just in case. Arrrrrr. 

Boys Toys

 

These dispiritingly colorless toys are from an outfit called Nova Natural Toys and Crafts, whose smug little catalog arrived here over the weekend. I'd never seen them before. My initial response is to hate them, since in my experience children care little about sustainability and toxic run-off and really like color (not to mention noise). But these trucks are actually pretty groovyonce you really take a look at them. They look a bit sturdier than the similar ones from Plan Toys, and the real working parts look like they might just really work. At sixty bucks a truck, they had better.

So I suppose I would have been leaning toward "Expensive, but they look like fun, plus you could always paint them" before I even got to that last one, on the bottom right there. But do you know what that is? That is a Unimog. They make a Unimog!  

No, I'd never heard of them either until I started hanging around with my husband, who always has the right tool for the job, except, well, he doesn't have an expensive German heavy-duty high-clearance  off-road vehicle* to go desert-ratting in.  But I do believe he would like to. So if Nova Toys and Crafts, the kind of outfit I'd otherwise have suspected of valuing virtue over fun, understands that a (certain type of) boy** needs a Unimog, I'm putting them on the "cool toys if you can afford them" list. Just like the Unimog itself. 

*(from Wikipedia, and not my bad grammar): New Unimogs can be purchased in either of three series:

1. Medium series 405, also known as the UGN ("Geräteträger" or equipment carrier), is available in the U300-U500 model.
2. heavy series 437, also known as the UHN ("Hochgeländegängig" or highly mobile cross country), is available as the U3000-U5000 model.
3. U20 is the smallest Unimog. It is based on a shortened U300 frame and has a cab over engine compartment from the Brazilian Accelo light truck (Caminhões Leves) series.

Hochgeländegängig!

**Yes, yes, girls too. But I don't happen to be married to one. 

Baa baa black sheep

I've had the somewhat revolting term "mutton dressed as lamb" stuck in my head for days like a bad but catchy melody. "Afternoon Delight," say, or "Tie A Yellow Ribbon." Those earworms are often idiopathic, though, while I know exactly why I've been thinking ovine thoughts: I got bored with the edge--free, not to say matronly style I'd defaulted to after too many bodily changes, and started looking longingly at engineer boots and big black buckle-y coats and other items I wore regularly in my, if not entirely wayward, certainly way waywarder than I am now youth. As I've started to add back in the occasional "Hey I was too a punk rocker" item, I've wondered if you're allowed to wear them over forty (hell yes) and whether people might judge me for it (also hell yes) and also whether anyone might ever look at me in my combat boots and think "mutton dressed as lamb."  One does hope not. And screw them, obviously. And yet at the same time one still hopes not. 

Look, here's one now, Style Spy proclaiming Doc Martens (how much do I want a pair of the cherry patent ones?) off-limits to anyone over-- get this-- 20.

I've managed a useful trick of mine-- fretting without actually caring-- about the whole issue until this last week, when I indulged a lifelong taste for funky legwear by buying a pair of loverly over-the-knee sockings, or stocks, Comme ça. They stretch way up, past the knees, and well into the zones not usually discussed here unless we are talking about diapering products. And they stay there, until they don't. I remembered some gartery clip-type things from the old days, and dug them out, and indeed they do work but they are old. Almost to the point of giving up old. And so I searched. 

Sock Dreams, the vaguely fetishy and altogether delightful sock fanciers shop I'd ordered from carries them but they are out of all colors except baby bllue, which, no. Men's shirt garters are hilarious (they attach your shirt to your socks) and available from haberdashers, but I don't need my shirt attached to my socks. I need my socks attached to my underwears. And so (and now you know why this post is here and not on socklover.com) I ordered mitten clips.  Little kids' mitten clips, for ataching their darling mittens to their snowsuits. The cutest, most innocent thing in the world, to hold up my sexxxxy soxxxx. I feel dirty. No, I really do. This is mutton dressed as lamb fetus. It's unseemly. And I dearly hope it will work. 

How to transport twins

My kids are both little (in mass) and little (in age), and I am a pedestrian, so the answer up to now has been this thing, the Jané (say "hah-NAY) Powertwin tandem stroller.

From Spain, don't you know. It's a sport-utility stroller, agile, compact, and gear-ish enough to please even my husband, who would buy everything at REI or the urban ninja store if he could. Clothes. Luggage. Eating utensils. Families, if they carried them. The Jané converts to a jogging stroller, if you like that sort of thing, It is cool and kind of tough and the children think of it as some sort of extensson of themselves. The Jané is perfect on the street, but you can't get it onto a bus to save your life, and it lacks storage space so it starts to look a little silly if you run errand after errand in it without dropping any of your stuff off at home in between:

I've recommended the Jané to twin families so often they ought to be paying me for the publicity, but as the kids get older and our lives, consequently, get more complicated, we're trying some other transport solutions as well. Results are mixed.

Some mornings their dad bikes them to preschool in a trailer, then leaves the trailer  (it converts to a stroller) for bike-free me to walk them home in. It is wide, comfy, fairly well-sprung, and affords them a bethroned posture, like little pashas in a sedan chair. It also allows them unprecedented access to each other, to not always pleasing effect. Given the chance to recreate the bench-seat bickering of our carseat-free youths, they take to it like pros: 

Kids: (shreiking)

Me: What is the problem up there?

Daughter: Mom, he's leaning on me!

Son: No, she was!

Me: Everybody stop leaning on each other or I'm pulling this stroller over.

Kids (silence as they try to figure out what the hell I'm talking about.)

We're all a good deal tireder and crabbier getting home after National Lampoon's "Home From Preschool,"  so I tried something else, the one-kid-stands-on-the-back shelf thingy that attaches to a singleton stroller. They both think this is enormous fun until I ask them to pick a position and stick with it for chrissake before somebody gets hurt. They'd really rather practice their stunt riding routine, and who (besides me, who has to push them) could blame them?

So now I'm thinking maybe a horse sledge, especially if I can get one of those horses from the cowboy songs,who faithfully trot home at end of day, or "the horse knows the way to carry the sleigh," anything, as long as I don't have to be there for the bickering.

Finally, though, we're going to outgrow all these options and have to drive, or, ideally, get one of these installed on either end. 

I can't remember, though-- can the transporter transport backpacks, half-eaten cheese sticks, and bits of paper covered with blotchy painty things? Because if not it isn't going to work. 

Open letter from a baby

Patrick's "That's right::you actually injured your child with a piece of safety equipment"  
is one of my favorite\sentence ever to appear on GGYJ. 

Here's today's rerun.
-Andrea

Open Letter from a Baby

by Patrick in Hate

Today's guest blog entry was telepathically communicated to me by my daughter.

To: Da-Da
Re: Straps

You know the other day when you were putting on my bicycle helmet? And I cried and squirmed, and you thought I was just being fussy about having to wear the helmet? Well, guess what, bucko: You caught a piece of my skin in the clasp.

That's right: you actually injured your child with a piece of safety equipment.Brilliant. I know you've got a dictionary, so see "petard: hoist by one's own."

While we're on the subject, let's have a little talk about straps. Seems like everything we get on or in has straps. The car seat? Straps. The stroller? Straps. The highchair? Straps. The changing table, the bouncy seat, the swing, the jumper, the helmet, the bike seat, the sun hat? You guessed it—straps.

This is a serious topic for the Infant-American Community.

Do you guys have stock in a nylon-webbing company, or something? No sooner do we come out of the womb than somebody tries to keep us immobilized. Well, I'm fed up with it. The babies of the world will unite and overthrow our captors! Just as soon as we get out of these… well, you know.

Oh, I prefer not to label myself

Every class at San Francisco Sex Information has at least two of these, the post-labelers, the unlabelers, although in truth they are pretty much always young women with exclusively heterosexual experience and vague aspirations toward bisexuality, but wow, does this ever not have much to do with labeling kids' clothes for camp and school. 

 My brothers and I had iron-in labels for summer camp, painstakingly hand-written in laundry pen. I don't remember school clothes ever being labeled, and I'm sure we would have thought it was dorky (although the preferred term at the time was probably "retarded" (sorry!) or "mental").  If we lost something (and we did) it was our fault, and nobody was going to return it, since they didn't know whose it was and would never have thought to check. A labeled jacket in 5th grade is still kind of dorky, but I'm sure today's super-cautious parents are extending their over-protectiveness to cover not only their children but their children's stuff as well. And I can't guarantee that I won't do the same-- that stuff is expensive!-- and if everyone else has labels too at least my kids won't stand out for dorkiness. Where everyone's a dork...

So here are Mabel's Labels. They make neat little stick-ons to adhere to the size- or care-tags in all your twenty-dollar Gymboree tee-shirts, and super-sticky waterproof, rub-proof ones for your  Sigg bottle and your lead-free lunch bag, neither of which we had back then either (we ate lead and we liked it, darn it), and even cunning dog-tag-style hang-tags for your backpack. None of these seem strictly necessary to anyone who owns a Sharpie, but they are undoubtedly convenient, and a pile of freshly matching-labeled fall clothes will likely provide the ship-shape, everything-in-its-place pleasure familiar from contemplating a nice new stack of school supplies: fresh, clean, full of promise, and best of all, yours. 

I did kind of horrify myself by ordering his in primary colors, with fire-truck icon, and hers in the "princess" colorway, with, what else,  princess icon. I'm getting over it, though. My kids are who they are. The just ran through here, Avi in the same play-clothes he'd been to the park in, and Lilah in her fairy-p'incess dress with matching pointy p'incess hat, and ladybug wings.

"Ooooo, I'm a ghost!" said Avi, pulling a pillow-case over his head. 

"Aaaaaah!" i shrieked, obligingly, while eyeing Lilah who stood there, expectantly, waiting for her shriek.

"You're not so scary," I said. "Sorry."

"But I a ghost ladybug," she clarified. 

What she needed was a label to that effect. You can't leave these things up to other people; they never get it right. 

. 

A cautionary tale

We never really used a baby monitor, not so much out of any sort of conviction that baby monitors are bad and wrong and only bad and wrong parents use them, but because we live in an apartment. Figuring out a way to hear the babies was never as much of an issue as figuring out how to not hear them. We got a nearly-broken one for free and use it if we're staying somewhere bigger or more treacherous than our little place in town. So this cautionary tale* is not mine; it's my friend Kim's. But it's too good.

We had a freaky moment this weekend: We have a video baby monitor which has never worked well - when I tried to use it when M was small, it kept broadcasting loud static every few minutes, which drove me bonkers, so I finally got a regular old "sound" monitor, which works well. We had terrible cell reception in our house up until a little while ago, as well as cheap cordless phones which have now been replaced, so I wondered if that was the problem. So, I broke out the video monitor again and set up the camera in the nursery, put M down for a nap and then went downstairs to turn on the remote. Static, static, static, no picture, etc. until I finally manoevered it into a clear picture. In order to keep the reception stable, I had to open a kitchen cupboard and put the receiver on a shelf, but whatever. 

I called (husband) into the kitchen to have a look at the ridiculous set up. Just as we were looking at it, A WOMAN IN A TOWEL WALKS INTO THE BABY'S ROOM!!! We stared at the little screen in shock. There is SOMEONE UPSTAIRS IN OUR HOUSE AND IN OUR BABY'S ROOM!!! 

I grabbed the monitor and stared at it, thinking: WTFF!!! It took us a few seconds to realize that it was NOT OUR BABY'S ROOM on the monitor: it was someone else's house! Someone else's crib, someone else's baby playing on the floor. My heart started beating again. But I still sent (husband) upstairs to make sure that no one was up there, other than our own sleeping baby. 

No matter what I did, I could NOT get reception of our own nursery on that thing (changed the channel, etc.) so I turned it off and put it away. I have no idea whose house or child that was. 

That could have gone so very wrong in so many ways...

*When my nephew was tiny, around the age when most babies know maybe "ball" and "duck" but are still working on "mama," you could show him a copy of Sendak's "Pierre" and ask him what ind of tale it was.

"A cau-sin-nary tale, " he'd pipe. 

Come fly with me

This is a pretty good "traveling with tots"  post. I didn't bother reading the suggestions for infants, since infants are a totally captive audience and they get they get, and I didn't bother reading the older kids section either, since a seven-year-old ought to be able to figure some of that stuff out her herself, plus they can read. The preschooler's list is good, though. I was especially entertained to see "blue painter's tape" on anyone's must-take list but ours. We've been carrying painter's tape since the earliest days of child-proofing, since you can use if to tape up cabinets and cordon off dangerous areas and, in a pinch, keep a small child in his chair, I suppose. Now that they're too smart and too big to be kept in line by a merely suggested barrier like a piece of tape, we still carry it because it's diverting and harmless. Just don't give them the whole roll at once. Seriously.

Missing from the list is my kids' current favorite not-running-around-making-noise toy: my iPhone. It's annoying as hell to have people constantly stealing your phone when you want to use it, but since you can't use it on the plane anyway load it up with kid-friendly apps, put it in airplane mode, and let 'em go crazy. Also, give them snacks that are bad for them (thus rare and valued) and take a long time to eat, A snack-sized bag of potato chips, doled out chip by chip, buys a half hour of contented munching, plus many opportunities to practice "please?' and "thank you."

Toddler-having friends and I all note the lack of a magic slate/Magnadoodle/Aquadoodle/dwawing thing. You need one of those. Everyone likes the idea of the pipe cleaners and the Colorforms, most of us bring little boxes or bags filled with small surprises which can then be refilled with whatever as long as unpacking them gives the kids something to do, everyone relies heavily on sticker books, and it's probably not a good idea to bring a large inflatable ball on an airplane. 

Well, actually, I think it's a great idea, but nobody around us would agree.

Be Gone, You Evil Binky

Sometimes I’m just amazed by what’s out there on the Interwebs to gull the gullible, especially the gullible parent. 

Here's the latest. For a mere $54.99, you can purchase the loving and magical Pacifier B Gone system to rid your child of that pesky binky forever.

Pacifier B Gone touts itself as “the nurturing answer on the market today that will remove the pacifier from your child's life in a loving and magical way.”

Got that, kids? It’s loving and magical. Completely the opposite of the “it’s a hard-knock life, kid” method that my husband and I scarred our son with when he was 18 months old.

They go on to note that the creators couldn’t get their minds around a heartless method that allows a child to cry for up to five days. “We love our children too much to let that happen,” the site says, implying of course that we don't, and also, we're mean.

But the funny thing is…the actual kit itself is really not crazy. It’s just a bunch of stuff that most parents of stubbornly be-binked kids already use: the wall chart with stickers, the lovey, the book with the sweetly compelling story about the “big kid” who gives up her paci. It’s just all packaged conveniently together at a big mark-up. 

I’m actually not opposed to a kindler-and-gentler method of binky cessation. My husband and I like to talk big, but we didn’t really make our son go cold-turkey when we decided it was time for him to debinkify.

Over the course of a few months, we began limiting the binky use to rides in the car, naptime and bedtime, then naptime and bedtime, and finally just bedtime. We also strongly encouraged his attachment to a stuffed frog. We talked up the whole “big boy” aspect. And what do you know, by the time my husband took the last handful of binkies out of the crib, our son was pretty much okay with it.

We managed to accomplish this just fine on our own, without spending nearly $60. And with this recession on, unless you’re doing a lot better than I am, I bet you can stumble along on your own, too.

BKBs!

We've got two kids and one not overly spacious room, so how is this not the perfect solution?  

 

We removed the ladder, got a trundle mattress (the big drawer could be storage if you didn't have to stash a second twin somewhere), and turned the upper bunk into a storage loft until the kids can be trusted:

Adorable IKEA bedding and friends:

 

We all have a little Martha or Pottery Barn Kids catalogue stylist in us. Sometimes it has to come out:

I just couldn't bring myself to spell out the word "balls" in bright childish stick-on felt letters, though: