Of Baby Bling and Basil

It is possible to buy some seriously ridiculous stuff for babies. A recent wander through Babies R Us led to the discovery of endless expensive entertainment options for newborns, including those roughly the age of ours, who is still working on vision at the six-inch range. Slightly more disturbingly, though, it also leads to the discovery of all sorts of new things I should apparently be worried about as a parent.

There are, as even a novice parent like me knows, plenty of sound reasons to worry. I love this Ellen Bass poem on the topic. I imagine I’ll have many years to wrestle that demon over Mason’s fate. Anxious is no way to live, though, and the worrying generally doesn’t actually help with anything, so I’ll fight it for all I’m worth, in spite of the fact that there are very real dangers in the world.

And then there are extremely dumb things to worry about. And where there aren’t reasonable causes, people are only too happy to create them for you if it will make you buy stuff from them. Example: worrying that your baby’s head won’t be perfectly round.

Deanna and I stumbled on this while picking up some baby bottles last week. My favorite part is the text around the photo of the baby, who at first glance appears to be on oxygen. It says “Mom-friendly caliper for measuring the shape of your baby’s head.” Sure glad that caliper is mom-friendly, even if that means the caliper would be mean to me.

I mean seriously… this is a tool for measuring slight imperfections that may not be visible to the naked eye? Are slight variations in symmetry that are invisible really a problem?

I am of the general mindset that people have been successfully having babies for millennia without the use of warehouses full of baby junk, but I have to admit that my smugness is wearing off a bit regarding one bit of gear that I once dismissed derisively.

Wipe warmers are not to be sneered at. Repeated exposures to a child who is understandably upset to have cold things applied to his warm places have been enough to convince me. Not that we’re getting one, but I’m afraid the smirk has been wiped from my face, with a cold wipe.

Here’s the mystery of the month, though… Deanna and I are vegetarian, and we eat a fair amount of leafy greens. That doesn’t explain, though, how the contents of Mason’s diapers could appear to reveal the presence of leafy greens. Close examination appears to reveal that someone sprinkled some wet basil in there. And that just seems like a lot of wasted work— for Deanna to eat spinach, digest it, turn it into milk, give it to Mason, who then reconstitutes it into spinach…?! Parenting is a wondrous adventure indeed, full of mystery and revelation, (and I’m not even six weeks into it).

And speaking of Sir Squeaksalot, here are a few new pictures: