Pregnancy

Everyone made a big huge deal about the wife of Twitter’s CEO tweeting her labor last week in San Francisco, but her tweets, while amusing (I liked “Epidural, yes, please,” at 2:49 a.m.), added up to a mere three posts during the labor itself. What’s far more interesting at this point is to follow Sara Williams’ Twitter feed, as well as that of her husband Evan, to see a picture of a couple bowled over by their newborn. “Up to our ears in baby products. Favorites so far: the Woombie and Itzbeen,” said Sara two days ago, while Evan posted Monday: “Checking the Twitters with the boy.” Awww.

If you’d like to follow the Williams’ example, maybe you’d be interested in a project called the Kickbee, a prototype developed by a New York new daddy who wanted to be more immersed in his growing child’s development. Sensors strapped around the pregnant belly send wireless updates to Twitter: “Wow I’m being very active! I kicked Mommy 13 times at 03:44AM on Thu, Dec 11!” What better way to show your spouse the agony of constant fetal kicking than a whole bunch of Tweets?

Sure, we all love those “This Week In Your Pregnancy” emails where the writer attempts to make you understand the current size of your fetus by comparing him with a type of food (”This week, your baby is the size of a kidney bean/lemon/avocado/coconut”), but sometimes picturing the little kidney bean in your belly just isn’t enough. How’s a mom supposed to contain her raging curiosity between ultrasounds?

Download The Baby Ticker, available free from San Francisco’s Widgetbox.com, maker of the downloadable bits of useful software known as widgets. Input some simple information about your pregnancy, click to download, and poof! The widget appears on your desktop, with a countdown to the due date and a representation of what your baby should look like, given his current state of development. Each day, the widget-baby will move, grow and change, just like your own. Oooh, finger buds! Look, he’s sucking his thumb! It’s creepy-cool to everyone but a pregnant lady. For her, it’s magical.

It sucks to spend hundreds of dollars on maternity wear that you’re going to dump on Goodwill six months from now. Skinnymaternity.com, a new website launched in the Bay Area, intends to be the Craigslist of maternity and new baby gear. Got stuff to sell? List it on the site. Need something? Cruise over to see if someone else has it.

The site’s brand new and patchy right now, but hopefully it’ll fill up soon with stuff that won’t be going to a landfill instead. And let’s also hope that it will be stuff that’s a mite hipper than you find in Goodwill’s maternity section, the final resting place of all those little flowered tieback dresses from the ’80s.

Visit skinnymaternity.com.

A small-but-interesting study suggests that babies delivered by C-section are more likely to develop asthma and allergies. Researchers analyzed the umbilical cord blood of 50 babies born by Caesarean and 68 babies delivered vaginally, with at least one of the baby’s parents afflicted with asthma or allergies.

Says Dr. Ngoc Ly, one of the study’s authors and an assistant professor of pediatrics at UCSF, “We found a dysfunctional cellular response in the normally protective immune system among C-section babies. And although more work needs to be done to follow how long this response might endure, we think this disrupted immune pathway may influence the development of asthma later on.”

The researchers also theorized that vaginal delivery could expose infants to immune-building microbes.

This seem particularly rich to me given that the U.S. has the highest rate of C-sections in the world. And despite UCSF’s pride at their C-section rate of 22.8%, lower than the national rate of about a third, and also lower than the going San Francisco rate of about a quarter, that’s still almost 1 in 5 women going home with a big slice across their bellies, and an infant who may be affected for life, in ways we don’t even really yet understand.

Interestingly, another of the study’s lead authors, Dr. Wilfried Karmaus, is involved in other crunchy-compliant projects, such as a study to determine the best diet for breastfeeders and a long-term project linking exposure to environmental toxins to immune system damage. Could be a good idea to keep an eye on that guy.

It’s becoming more and more clear that exposure to bisphenol-a, a.k.a. BPA, is harmful for humans — particularly teeny ones. That particular hormone-disrupting chemical nasty, found in many plastic baby bottles, sippy cups, can liners (most notoriously cans of baby formula), sealable storage containers, etc. etc., can leach into liquids and thus be ingested, potentially causing everything from breast and prostate cancer to early puberty.

How to minimize your exposure? SafeMama has a great list of BPA-free bottles, milk and food storage systems and sippy cups. Print it and take it when you when you buy baby supplies, because even though San Francisco banned the sale of BPA-containing baby bottles in 2006, you can still find plenty of tainted polycarbonate on grocery and drugstore shelves around town.

For the sippy-cup set, BPA-free SIGG kids’ water bottles are all the rage amongst San Fran parents. You can buy gorgeously patterned ones at the ACE Hardware/Standard 5 ‘n’ 10 in the Laurel Village shopping plaza, at most Whole Foods, or REI, though they don’t have as many cute kids’ bottles as Whole Foods or ACE. My own kid’s wild about a Hello Kitty BPA-free Thermos FUNtainer we got at Target, but you’ll look a whole lot cooler carting around a SIGG, trust me on this one.