Archive for November, 2009

Do you Zhu Zhu? With our penchant for turning nouns into verbs - “friend,” “defriend,” “Google,” “Facebook” - it’s only a matter of time before this year’s must-have holiday toy gets its own verb. Meanwhile, many parents are already so over Zhu Zhus. These pet hamsters scamper around, appearing just a little too life-like. Not a welcome sight for city residents already dealing with urban rodents that have a tendency to visit even the poshest pads in the zip code.

Today, we start UrbanBaby’s “Gifted,” our guide to holiday shopping. Obviously you know about the above-mentioned hot hamsters and their scarcity on store shelves. Well, coming off Thanksgiving weekend, we thought we’d begin Gifted with gifts that give back:

Saving animals -Help save homeless animals by purchasing a Poppy the Bulldog t-shirt, available in both child and adult sizes at recession-friendly prices. Proceeds from shirt sales are donated to animal shelters and organizations committed to providing veterinary care for homeless animals. For when you’re sick of all the holiday bull.

Swimmin’ with the fishes - Adopt a sea creature through Oceana, the world’s largest international organization solely dedicated to ocean conservation. If you “adopt,” say, a seal, Junior will get a plush version plus an accompanying adoption certificate. Your donation will go toward helping these pinnipeds (fin-footed animals), whose icy habitats are falling victim to global warming. This year’s sea creature spotlight belongs to the sea turtle. In addition to stuffed animals, Oceana’s Adopt-a-Creature program also offers cookie cutters. This present is anything but!

Supporting the troops &
Operation Shower - Operation Shower, an organization that coordinates unit-wide baby showers and “showers in a box” for expectant military families, and the website Extraordinary Mommy are sponsoring Holiday Shoperation. Proceeds from sales at various online retailers, including babyhautecouture.com (European children’s clothing), bumblecollection.com (upscale diaper bags, etc), and cuddlebee.com (baby accessories made from high-end fabrics with a nod to “yesterday’s flair”), help pay for these all-American baby showers.

Less risk of buyer’s remorse.

Your burgeoning belly garners you plenty of attention, so when your headlights are on it can make you want to run and hide. Many’s the pregnant woman cursed with erect nipples throughout the gestation, and there are many options to hold ‘em down.

While the low-tech simply use round bandages, there are a whole bunch of nipple pads on the market, to be worn inside the bra or pasted right onto your breasts: Bezi Bra Discs, Low Beams, Hollywood No-Shows, Sassynips, etc. Some are disposable, running about $2-5 per pair (what a rip!), others are reusable.

There are also bras with special “concealing petals” for the hard-nippled. Check out the offerings from Bali in a range of utilitarian black and white and Victoria’s Secret Ipex bras, which are both prettier and flimsier.

Oh, and by the way: if your belly button pops out embarrassingly too, there’s at least one product on the market designed to combat it: Miss Oops Popper Stoppers, a steep $13 for five bandage-like covers.

Baby see, baby do, especially when Mommy’s tapping and typing on the computer. But even when you’re willing to prop the kid up and let him have at your keyboard, there’s nothing he can do there. Even PBSkids.org, the gateway drug of the preschooler’s Internet experience, requires users to be at least a little proficient on the mouse to get around. A brand new button-pusher is hopelessly lost.

Kneebouncers.com is just right for these very little ones. Click on one of a few free games for baby, and then sit back and watch as every key he hits elicits a response. A big guitar plays “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” cartoon animals jump up and down on a bed. There’s no way to play wrong, and babies laugh and laugh. Now maybe you can have two seconds to send an email.

Hard on the heels of worries about BPA in cans and bottles, the University of Rochester Medical Center made waves last week with a study on the potentially feminizing effects of phthalates. Here’s the money sentence of the release: “A study of 145 preschool children reports, for the first time, that when the concentrations of two common phthalates in mothers’ prenatal urine are elevated their sons are less likely to play with male-typical toys and games, such as trucks and play fighting.”

Great! So phthalates, which are found everywhere, in plastics, in food, in your body, everywhere, are going to give us girlie-boys? Not so fast, study lead author Shanna H. Swan: Forbes.com contributor Trevor Butterworth has seen you before. He points out that Shanna Swan has been a prominent voice in the recent rise of worries over phthalates thanks to a widely reported-on 2005 study by Shanna Swan:

“Swan claimed that levels of certain phthalate metabolites in pregnant women correlated with a lower anogenital index in their male children (the AGI is a measurement of the distance from the anus to the base of the penis, divided by the weight at the time of measurement)

There wasn’t a consensus as to what a normal range for AGI was in baby boys or whether it is significant, but there was evidence that a shorter AGI correlated with a slower rate of testicular descent in animals. When a National Institutes of Health expert panel later evaluated her study, it didn’t find her evidence wholly convincing. All the babies in the study had normal genitalia with no sign of defects.

In short, there were no grounds for panic. But Swan wrote an op-ed for the San Francisco Chronicle claiming that “In-utero exposures to phthalates can lead to birth defects and genital malformations … in baby boys.” It didn’t matter that her study never even considered this hypothesis, or that such a claim wouldn’t have passed peer review based on the data she provided: Environmental activists and journalists seized on her public comments as proof the public was at risk. Phthalates and Shanna Swan suddenly became the poster boy and girl for deformed penises.”

This most recent study involved Swan going back to the mothers of the boys in her 2005 study and asking questions about the way they play, a method Butterworth (and UrbanBaby) finds suspect. Phthalates may indeed turn out to have feminizing effects on humans (much research has already been published on their effects on frogs), but Butterworth points out that better research than Swan’s needs to be done to pinpoint just what’s going on. Until then, no need to panic. Or push trucks on your boys.

Flash back to physics class a few decades ago. Newton’s third law of motion states, “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” The same can be said of parenting philosophies. “The Case Against Over-Parenting: Why Mom and Dad Need to Cut the Strings” is the cover story of the Time magazine issue hitting newsstands today. The piece examines the transition we’re seeing from full-speed-ahead helicopter parenting to “slow parenting,” aka “simplicity” or “free-range” parenting. Hey, we already have a slow food movement and even a beverage called Drank that’s supposed to “slow your roll.” It’s about time we eased up on what Time editor-at-large Nancy Gibbs calls “the almost comical overprotectiveness and overinvestment of moms and dads.”

Gibbs writes, “We were so obsessed with our kids’ success that parenting turned into a form of product development … college deans described freshmen as ‘crispies,’ who arrived at college already burned out, and ‘teacups,’ who seemed ready to break at the tiniest stress.” Now, as with fashion and fine food, “less is more.” And we have the Great Recession to thank, at least in part, for solidifying this new, relaxed parenting mindset. A CBS News poll found that since the onset of the recession, “a third of parents have cut their kids’ extracurricular activities.” Both parents and kids seem to be benefiting from this sort of forced schedule reliever and streamlined lifestyle. A Time poll last spring revealed that nearly four times as many people said their relationships with their kids have gotten better as said they’d deteriorated.

The article also gives a nod to the importance of play “as an essential protein in a child’s emotional diet.” The freedom for kids to explore on their own sans constant structure and enrichment activities is what helps them learn essential life skills such as flexibility, resilience and leadership.

Many of us could use a stint in the sandbox.

Mamatini. The name sounds like a product that should be front and center in the upcoming Sex and the City 2 movie, now that at least two of the fab four (maybe more?) have kids.

Mamatini is a doctor-designed drink for breastfeeding women. Think of it as a healthy sports drink for the lactating crowd. It’s loaded with vitamins and only 20 calories. Mamatini contains herbs - fenugreek, fennel and ginger - to stimulate milk production and increase energy levels. Women have used fenugreek for centuries to cope with breastfeeding issues, and the herb, a member of the peanut family, is a staple in Indian curries.

Mamatini is the brainchild of former venture capitalist and mother of three Erica Duignan Minnihan. Minnihan was sick of brewing fenugreek tea at all hours of the night and decided to collaborate with her kids’ pediatrician (her mother!) to develop a ready-made drink that would make postpartum life just a tad better. This “ginger-mint herbal infusion” beverage is sweetened with a touch of cane sugar.

It bridges the gap until you’re ready to go back to cosmos.

Available at drinkmamatini.com.

Silhouette portraits, an exceedingly common wall decoration and keepsake in Victorian times, is now something of a lost art. It’s a pity, since there are few things cuter than a baby’s double chin or the pursed bow lips of a preschooler, and silhouettes capture details like this perfectly.

Master silhouette artist Karl Johnson still practices the vintage craft, using photographs to cut out his images freehand, instead of using the tracing method of lesser artists. The silhouette portraits he produces are wonderfully accurate and charmingly old-fashioned, a perfect holiday gift for grandparents. They’re darned cheap, too: $25 for a 5 x 7 face-and-shoulders portrait, $50 for a 8 x 10, with extras like colored paper and full-body silhouettes costing a bit more. One divine extra to shell out for: $15 for a digital file of the silhouette, perfect for birthday invites and holiday cards.

Silhouette Pictures by Karl Johnson, starting at $25

Whatever behavior problem your child is currently having (living in a pigsty, ignoring you when you talk, picky eating), chances are its been addressed in the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle series of books by Betty MacDonald. The series of five books was published in the ’40s and ’50s and written by an author who was already famous for her smash book, The Egg and I. In the Piggle-Wiggle series, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle is a kind of magical good fairy whose late husband left her a pirate chest full of cures for childhood “ailments.” In each chapter, a mother who is concerned about her child’s behavior comes to see Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle for help and is issued a cure that clears the troublesome behavior right up.

Some of the cures are relatively pedestrian: when Hubert Prentiss won’t clean up his bedroom, his mother simply lets the toys pile up until he can’t get out of his room anymore and is forced to clean it up himself. Other cures are magical: When Evelyn Rover and Mary Crackle are being unkind to Cornelia Whitehouse, Mrs. Crackle gives the girls some candy-like Whisper Sticks that makes their teasing inaudible.

Regardless of whether the cures are real-world or not (I could use some Crybaby Tonic, for sure), it’s fun to read about a kid having a behavior issue to a kid who’s having that same issue, and it can spark both interesting conversations and maybe even change. At the very least, kids love hearing about naughtiness and comeuppance, good adults who know everything, and stories that end happily. And neither parents nor children can resist the Piggle-Wiggle illustrations, some by Hilary Knight of Eloise fame, and some by Maurice Sendak.

The L’ovedbaby Arms-Free Swaddler has a horrific name. Really? You want that apostrophe in there? Huh. But despite the bad name, the swaddler is a genius idea. When babies are first born, a tight arms-and-all swaddle helps them sleep. But just a few months later, they start fighting to get their arms free and wake themselves up doing it. With the genius Arms-Free, their arms can wave around while their legs are controlled. Hey, anything that gets you 20 minutes of extra sleep.

L’ovedbaby Arms-Free Swaddler, $29.95

Your DC gets an incredible present haul around her birthday and Christmas/Hanukkah. But too much of a good thing can be overwhelming. Too many gifts, too little time, too small an attention span. So spread the wealth.

The founders of Project of the Month Club understand present pacing. Club members receive a different self-contained art project every month. That means they send you everything needed to complete the project. No need to go scavengering for your own Elmer’s. You can select from different categories, including Mix ‘n’ Match (step stool, game board, craft caddy) for kids ages 4-8 and Master Builders (woodworking) and Future Designers (jewelry kits, perfume, purses) for slightly older kids. Coming soon: Pint-Sized Painters and Seismic Scientists. If a monthly project seems like too much of a commitment, you’ve got other membership options: bi-monthly, quarterly and 4-in-a-row.

It’s just like a wine club. Sort of …

Visit projectofthemonthclub.com.