The Perfect Baby Handbook » Imperfection

The perfect parent’s iPhone apps

dale — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 05:07:57 +0000

YAY: "Dad has an iPhone, is finally cool!"

Once, in an era known as pre-2007, you could raise children without an iPhone. This is no longer possible, implies Time magazine, with this list of hot iPhone apps for “new moms.”

The “BabyCam” app, which tops the list, solves a timeless problem:

Getting your baby to smile for the camera long enough to take a perfect picture can be a challenge. Using BabyCam’s sound button to play one of the app’s fifteen prerecorded noises—bells, drums, doorbells and songs including “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” helps.

For parents who prefer to snap an imperfect picture, there is also the “BabyPissOff” app. Use its sound buttons to play an arrangement of “Mary Had a Little Unsmiling Lamb” that’s heavy on blaring trumpets, shrill oboes, hisses, rattles, yelps, groans, keening, and a woman’s voice repeating, “Not in service. Please try your call again.”

Perfect babies, perfect parents, and FAILure

dale — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 04:49:12 +0000

“My child must succeed! I will give her every opportunity to succeed! She will learn to write tricky words like ‘constitution’ in a lovely, calligraphic hand, but her vocabulary will never include ‘failure’!” It was such modest claims that inspired me to satirize competitive parenting in The Perfect Baby Handbook.

OOPS: Originally conceived as a guide to abstinence.

Now, it turns out, that while I was busy satirizing and you were trying not to be too easily satirized, the verb “fail” was turning into the noun “FAIL” (always capitalized) and becoming a cultural phenomenon.

Exhibit A: The website, FAILblog.org, launched in Jaunary, 2008, by the same ingeniously simplistic people who brought you LOLcats. FAILblog invites users to submit images of things that have been done badly, horribly, or disastrously. You might, for example, be able to spot a certain, subtle flaw in this book cover (right).

Exhibit B: This weekend, The New York Times magazine devotes an “On Language” column to the phenom, reporting that Americans are applying the “FAIL” concept to everything from CNN’s coverage of the Iraq protests to clumsy cows, from Bill Clinton to Amazon.com snafus. The recession, one observer tells the Times, has only fueled the temptation to see the world through FAIL-tinted glasses:

“It really started to take off when the financial industry decided to — ahem — fail…Talk about the perfect storm.” The fail meme met the financial crisis head on at a Senate hearing in September, when a demonstrator held up a sign reading “FAIL” behind Henry Paulson Jr., the former Treasury secretary, and Ben S. Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve.

“Shut up, shut up!” you may be saying. “What about my baby?” Well, just make sure you don’t send him or her to this not-so-august institution:

Related Posts:
• Family togetherness FAIL
• Babysitting FAIL
• Homophobia FAIL

Family togetherness is a trend that makes you wear all-white and behave inappropriately

dale — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 03:58:08 +0000

If you haven’t quite decided what your favorite parenting trends of 2009 are quite yet, please keep an open mind. Surfnetparents.com would like to suggest this one, “Nature Vacations”:

Note the caption: Apparently, the crazy fad that’s leading American families to conduct public orgies on dude ranch holidays while wearing “innocent” white clothing never dies.

I’m confused. Why is this vacationing family behaving like drunken, bisexual sailors? Why are they all dry-humping each other? Furthermore, what happens when some easily shocked horse from a neighboring ranch trots up to that fence in the background and starts neighing in horror?

Perhaps I’m reading too much into this. Let’s see what a “nature vacation” actually involves:

Hitting up hot springs, seeing geysers, hiking to the top of high peaks…be trendy with the kids this year…[and enjoy] the satisfaction that comes from a day spent in fresh air, and invigorating exercise.

Hot? Geysers? Peaks? Satisfaction? This doesn’t sound entirely innocent. Still, let’s not judge. Let’s allow this hedonistic family to have their reckless, imbalanced, psychologically damaging fun. They will, of course, discover that there’s always a price to pay the morning after, as this video reveals:

The legend of the demonic, incompetent babysitter

dale — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 03:59:08 +0000

A SITTER OF BABIES: As depicted, non-evilly, by Norman Rockwell

If you’d somehow failed to notice that babysitters have a bad rep, this Salon.com interview with Miriam Forman-Brunell about her new social history, Babysitter: An American History, is a splendid reminder.

Forman-Brunell is a woman who has clearly spent days watching and re-watching When a Stranger Calls, the 1979 horror movie that she says represents a certain culmination of an urban myth known as “The Babysitter and the Maniac”:

[In this legend], the children are upstairs usually asleep, and the babysitter gets a phone call asking her if she’s checked the children. She gets that phone call three times. After the third time she calls up the police to trace the call. He calls back and they call her to tell her that the man is in the house and that she has to get out of the house immediately. What usually happens is that she runs upstairs and finds the kids have already been murdered.

…That story gets circulated very widely, from coast to coast during the 1960s and throughout the 1970s. Kids actually contribute to the spread of it at summer camps and they share it as a true story. And finally by the end of the 1970s it gets made into a movie, “When a Stranger Calls” [starring Carol Kane as the babysitter]…

When I saw this film, I was quite impressed both by Carol Kane ability to bug out her gigantic eyes to convey fear. Lacking Forman-Brunell’s awareness of babysitter urban myths, I was also blown away by the originality of the twist. The Call, you see, was not just any call….

Sgt. Sacker: Jill, this is sergeant Sacker. Listen to me. We’ve traced the call… it’s coming from inside the house. Now a squad car’s coming over there right now, just get out of that house!

From inside the house! This made quite an impression on me. Partly because my brother, sister, and I did not have a bug-eyed babysitter who might conceivably drift off and let a killer infiltrate our Pleasantview split-level. The stalwart Judy, a future doctor, was a formidable teen who popped popcorn in a iron skillet and rarely, if ever, chatted with seductive strangers on our wall-mounted phone. Many years later, after ensuring that we did not get murdered, she married a man named Wyman. And still dropped by every Christmas with a box of Black Magic chocolates.

You know, I never questioned the the idea of chocolates called Black Magic until now. Maybe Judy was not so benign after all?

Related Posts:
• New York Times book critic comes out as a “baby bulimic”
• Admirably imperfect mom of the week: Stefanie Wilder-Taylor
• The fate of Paris Michael Jackson, according to the world’s meanest astrologer

New York Times food critic comes out as a “baby bulimic”

dale — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 04:00:20 +0000

Or, more precisely, a “toddler bulimic.” In this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, esteemed restaurant critic Frank Bruni confesses, extensively and juicily that, from an early age, he was an insanely motivated eater.

BRUNI: As troubled blob.

And a violently needy one. By Bruni’s account, adapted from his forthcoming memoir Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-Time Eater, if denied a third hamburger or a 144th cookie, he would work himself into a tormented tantrum and throw up —more or less on his mother.

…I’ve always wondered, in retrospect and not entirely in jest, if what she had witnessed was the beginning of a cunning strategy, an intuitive design for gluttonous living. Maybe I was making room for more burger. Look, Ma, empty stomach!

Though traditional bulimics are a tad more furtive about their purging, Bruni clearly realized that his piece would generate more buzz (and web-traffic) with the headline “I Was a Baby Bulimic” instead of “I Was a Kid With Bizarre Eating Issues.”

Calculation aside, the story (and companion audio-slide show) is fascinating. According to to Mediabistro, Bruni is quitting his Times’ post to promote his book so if you were hoping to see him projectile vomit at The Four Seasons while gorging himself critically on grilled octopus with minted eggplant, sorry, you’re out of luck.

Children at risk from Jon Gosselin’s “clothing designs”!

dale — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 03:55:13 +0000

WORST & CO: The sub-chic Jon & Hailey

Just when you thought Jon Gosselin, of “Jon & Kate Plus 8″ fame, couldn’t get any more loathsome, People magazine reported that he’d signed a new deal to design kids’ clothing for the Ed Hardy label with help from his new girlfriend. This seemed unfathomable and was later refuted by the rigorous journalists at Entertainment Tonight:

A rep for the clothing designer denies previous reports that the two were designing a new line together, telling ET, “There is no children’s clothing line in the works with Jon and Christian [Audiger, who designs for Ed Hardy]. It is untrue.”

With this respite, the world made sense again. I mean, seriously, have you clocked the way Jon dresses? Is there anyone less qualified to conceive youthful, innocent style except perhaps Jeremy Piven (“Entourage”) or Hulk Hogan (“Brain-Addled Wrestler”)? Has Jon absorbed some important life-lesson by leaving his spouse for Hailey Glassman, 22, the daughter of his wife’s plastic surgeon that might inform his sense of color and proportion? Do louts know how to sketch?

But damn: Turns out the People story might be true. And, if its original reporting stands, it gets worse. Much worse: The poor Gosselin sextuplets will be drafted to wear Jon’s fashions in ads. And his girlfriend is to uncreatively collaborate:

Glassman will also have a hand in creating the kid-friendly fashions. “She’ll have a lot of input with Christian,” Gosselin told PEOPLE of Hailey’s involvement.

Old Hailey can’t even choose sunglasses that flatter her strangely pointy face (though, in her defense, apparently she hasn’t let her plastic-surgeon dad give her an artificially squared-off face.)

Incidentally, People’s report on this development is hilariously even-handed, as if its reporter felt the need to hedge her bets in case women still find Jon adorable. Is that even possible?

Sasha Baron Cohen: Hey, sorry, your manipulatively marketed movie bombed

dale — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 04:00:22 +0000

I was talking to a California teacher the other day about the way her kids casually call each other “gay,” as the universal synonym for “uncool.” As she put it, they sincerely have no clue.

ASS: Cohen fails to fool enough bigots.

Understandably, I didn’t have a lot of faith in the American public’s ability to appreciate the satire that supposedly excuses Sasha Baron Cohen’s Bruno. Its (relentless) marketers clearly hoped that their “expose” of homophobia might conveniently be mistaken for “look how funny fags are” flick a la Adam Sandler’s I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry.

The joke is on Bruno’s promotional team, and Cohen himself. The movie made “only” 30 million this weekend, “shockingly low” according to the Los Angeles Times, which noted that its earnings collapsed from Friday to Saturday; all signs point, limply, to terrible word-of-mouth, possibly fueled by Twitter.

A couple theories. 1) It’s a lousy movie, whatever the majority of critics say; 2) For all the producers’ attempts to blur the satire factor for the bigot market, homophobes didn’t want to be seen at a “gay” movie.

Maybe the folks at Universal should have asked their kids.

Admirably imperfect mom of the week: Stefanie Wilder-Taylor

dale — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 03:59:16 +0000

It’d hard to be funny when you’re hanging out with tiny people who see no compelling reason to avoid gaping pits, ravenous dingoes, speeding Camaros, and large houses made of gingerbread. The parenting experience more typically facilitates freaking out, not the writing of a bestselling humor book.

VISION QUEST: Stefanie's book

So when someone like the truly hilarious Stefanie Wilder-Taylor* can turn parenthood into two such volumes, Sippy Cups Are Not For Chardonnay and Naptime is the New Happy Hour, the conventional wisdom is: Keep churning out similar books whose titles allude to boozing—like Kindergarten Rhymes with Scotch-on-the-Rocksergarten—and try to cash in.

Stefanie didn’t take that route. Instead she wrote It’s Not Me, It’s You, a casually outrageous memoir of her wild-child, pre-marriage 20s and 30s. It basically challenges her fans to deal with her rougher edges and get past the notion that moms aren’t allowed to have a racy back-story or scandalous thoughts. Stefanie recounts distinctly un-maternal tales: her erstwhile fascination with strippers’ breasts, her unwitting misadventures with crack cocaine, and her bittersweet attempt to reunite with her estranged dad, a brilliant stand-up comic who’d devolved into a brilliant pothead.

It’s a brave, funny book. Comedy depends on honesty—for something to be funny, the truth must be in there, somewhere. But while comics like Lenny Bruce and George Carlin were recklessly candid, and Margaret Cho and Kathy Griffin push the confessional edge, most “mommy humorists” are honest only up to a certain, decorous, wholesome, ultimately boring point.

I particularly liked the chapter about Stefanie’s attempts to be a Big Sister, and the loathsome, lonely child with whom she’s paired. It’s funny, sad, compassionate, infuriating, did I mention funny, and very, very real.

*Full disclosure: Stefanie “blurbed” The Perfect Baby Handbook, and has given me great advice. And, irrelevantly, is pretty hot. And, no, that’s not her on the cover of her book.

The fate of Paris Michael Jackson—according to the world’s meanest astrologer

dale — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 03:59:53 +0000

So I just discovered that Michael Jackson’s daughter, Paris, was born on April 3. The good news: So was I; it’s a really nice birthday. The bad news: Someday, Paris is going to read about herself in The Secret Language of Birthdays, this infamously rude, famously “accurate,” best-selling astrology book—and find out that she’s “demanding, self-centered, and naive.”

PARIS: Star-crossed

April 3, according to author Gary Goldschneider, a Dutch stargazer and Yale-educated psychoanalyst, is “The Day of the Fulcrum.” If we take his word for it, Paris is fun-loving and good natured, but also “manages to be at the center of things,” and likes to order her environment and control those around her. Consequently, she detests being ignored!

Also, he specifies, as an April 3 creature, Michael Jackson’s daughter will get fat and develop crippling headaches.

Lucky Paris! Your future as an obese, migraine-afflicted, control freak who likes to be mobbed by the paparazzi awaits you.

It could be worse. This cruelly irresistible book claims that babies born on October 4th are incorrigible, headstrong, and foolhardy while July 22nd infants (“The Day of Occupational Fluctuations”) are unlucky and stressed-out.

Outraged mom reacts—sluggishly—to a 2001 teen trend

dale — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 03:51:55 +0000

Almost all parents excel when it comes to paranoia. For the few who don’t know how to freak out competently on their own, there are syndicated parenting columnists like Debra-Lynn B. Hook to give them a nudge. In a recent piece, Hook uncovers a trend so disturbing she can’t quite process it:

Co-ed sleepovers. I repeat: Teenage girls and teenage boys having a slumber party. Together. At the home of willing parents. Whaaaat?

CORRUPTING INFLUENCE: Sleeping bag.

As incomprehensible as this idea is, Hook—a Kent, OH-based journalist, mother, and African drumming enthusiast—can prove it’s really happening; she references a Time.com report which says the trend “been ’sweeping the teen circuit’ for several years.”

Problem is: The Time story in question was published in January, 2001. The so-called sweeping took place in the ’90s. Which isn’t to say Time’s coverage doesn’t merit attention. It’s actually quite funny: At one point, the writer suggests that parents who wish to host slutty sleepovers safely would be well-advised to invest in security systems. That way:

[Any teen] coming or going will set off [the] house alarm. For families without security systems, I suggest that a parent sleep on a cot or couch near the door.

Hook does cite some empirical evidence: Her own 16-year-old daughter, it seems, actually attended a boy/girl post-prom sleepover this May “in a buttercup yellow dress and just the tiniest bit of mascara.” The discovery of this event so stunned Hook she couldn’t quite process it:

“…one of the moms confirmed the kids’ after-party was at her house. The boy-girl after-party. The boy-girl SLEEPOVER after-party.”

In case you’re wondering. a Google search doesn’t exactly confirm that co-ed slumbering is back! and destroying the nation’s fabric. But maybe it is. I’ll do some more checking and see if I can find a 1972 Hartford Courier exclusive or maybe a mention in the 1897 Farmer’s Almanac. Please refrain from panic until we can sort this out.