Cookies are Yummy!

In general, I find parenting magazines to be a little, well, wholesome. A quick scan of this month's covers include stories on turkey-themed craft projects, how The Apprentice's Carolyn juggles work and family, how to avoid turning into a stressball when your bundle of joy has the sniffles, how to make sure you've hooked up your car seat properly, fabulous baby shower ideas, seventeen different perspectives on co-sleeping, and so forth. Yawn.

So imagine my surprise upon receiving the inaugural issue of Cookie magazine in the mail yesterday. It's got everything an Urban Mommy could want:

• Reviews of various strollers, ranging from reasonably-priced to super-duper high end
• Suggestions for chic haircuts for one's child, including what to tell the hair stylist to ensure that you get the look you want
• An essay on the national obsession with celebrity pregnancy and childbirth
• Three top chefs' suggestions for uncomplicated kid-friendly recipes incorporating spinach
• Twelve recommended family beach vacations, including some in places considerably more exotic than Orlando
• Unique gift ideas for both children and adults
• Pilates-themed exercises for pregnancy
• All kinds of amusingly high-fashion kids' clothes mixed in with cute-but-less-outrageous selections -- including store names and (more importantly) lesser-known websites from which to purchase said adorable items

I read Cookie cover to cover in one sitting (something I don't do so often) and found myself dog-earing pages and making mental notes all over the place. Finally, a magazine about motherhood for the slightly less wholesome mommy.

Go forth and subscribe while the subscribing is cheap.

The Gift That Keeps On Confusing

The holiday season is upon us, and I'm left with an interesting question about gift giving. What is the appropriate gift for my son's day care providers?

A bit of background. My son has been attending since July, and it's five days a week, all day. It's a day care center (as opposed to a home based business) with multiple teachers, some of whom are full-time, some part-time. There are as many as eight teachers, and there are often subs from other rooms. To complicate matters, Baby Banana only moved into his current room two weeks ago - for his first 4 months he was in a different room with different teachers (6 of them). It's a Jewish day care, but most of the teachers are not Jewish.

I know that the rule of thumb with nannies involves giving them an extra week (or more) of salary as a holiday bonus, but I wouldn't know how to begin to translate that into this context (not only do I have no idea how much these folks make, and needless to say I can't give each of them a week's salary!). Is this a cash situation? A gift certificate situation? A gift situation? Some combination? Does everyone get the same amount/thing regardless of whether they are part or full time? Do I get something for subs who I've gotten to know? And perhaps most importantly, how do I deal with old room teachers and new room teachers? Thankfully, this year timing is not an issue as Chanukah starts on Christmas.

Thoughts are appreciated. Keep in mind that I want to be generous, but I don't want to go overboard and be seen as one of "those" parents.

I May Be Urban, But I Ain't Hip

For those looking to do a little holiday shopping, Babystyle is doing a sale right now - 20% off everything on the site plus free shipping. Code is TWENTYOFF. (I feel totally comfortable posting this since you'll see it the minute you go to their site.) Babystyle's emails are worth signing up for - they're forever having good sales and they carry things you rarely find on sale anywhere else, like Robeez shoes.

Anyway, one of the products on Babystyle's "Top 5 Books" list seemed apropos for this blog. It's a book called "Urban Babies Wear Black" by Michelle Sinclair Colman. The description is this: "For hip mamas and urban babies everywhere! This adorable board book takes a sneak peek at the average day in the life of babies who eschew goo-goo, ga-ga for the Guggenheim instead! Posh babies and little latte drinkers will appreciate the fine dining, gallery-going, yoga-practicing babes in this book, as well as the fresh and fun illustrations throughout." If anyone buys it, let me know how it is... we're not even remotely hip enough to own it.

And confidentially wishing good luck to one of our regular readers who will, with any luck, be welcoming baby 2.0 to the family sometime today!

EDITED TO ADD: OK, the sale isn't quite as good as I thought - the aforementioned Robeez are excluded from the sales, and already-discounted items don't count either, but it's a great deal on their regular priced stuff, and you get free shipping on everything regardless.

A Love Letter to Flea

If you're not reading One Good Thing, you should be. Written by Flea, who is simultaneously the mother of 2 boys and the owner of a (now only mail order) sex toys shop geared toward women, this blog is a nice mix of perspectives from both of her worlds. The content is often very adult (of the "don't click on at work" variety), but the stuff she writes about parenting is both hilarious and heartbreaking. Her older son has sensory integration disorder and while he's doing quite well now, he's been a challenging child. Flea writes such passages as this:

I got an e-mail from a woman whose son got kicked out of preschool last week, asking if there was some club we could join, a club for mothers who cringe every time the phone rings, thinking it will be the school administrators telling us to come remove our hellion from the premises. A club with her, me, and Neal Pollack, sitting around saying things like:

"A biter. Yours?"

"A non-talker."

"Mine flips the light switches on and off until other children fall into seizures."

(Pause.)

"Other people suck."

"Yup."

"More beer?"

"Yup."

She makes me laugh all the time, and often makes me cry. Go enjoy Flea.

How We Gonna Pay . . .

From yesterday's Wall Street Journal:

"Renting Baby Gear
November 8, 2005; Page D1

"The Problem: You want to avoid schlepping a crib, highchair and car seat aboard an airplane.

"The Solution: Most travel destinations now have rental companies for baby gear, and not just in resorts like Orlando, Fla. There are baby-gear places from Lake Tahoe to Rhode Island, and most will deliver to an airport or your hotel room or rental apartment. Car-rental companies often rent a child's car seat, but they don't guarantee availability. And a folding stroller may be convenient to carry around, but parents can rent a jogging or beach stroller on arrival. Some rental agencies offer familiar brands, and for an extra fee many will drop off diapers and formula with the baby gear. To find a baby-gear rental store, travelers can ask their hotel ahead of time, or look online at sites such as www.BabyAway.com. Caveat: If you don't pay for set-up, you may find yourself erecting an unfamiliar crib without the original instructions."

I haven't decided if this is brilliant or ridiculous. Parts of it are fraught with problems. First off, the two big items that are safety crucial are car seats and cribs - the items that seem to be most dealt with here. I'm not sure I'd feel all that safe using a rented crib or car seat for an infant, although I might for an older kid. Also with infants, you're mostly going to be taking a car seat on a plane anyway so you have a place to put the kid during the flight. And if you don't have a car seat with you, there could be serious problems getting to and from various airports.

On the other hand, this would be great for pack and plays, jogging strollers and the like, and there's a lot to be said for not schlepping diapers and formula. The cost of all of this starts to get prohibitive pretty fast if you're expecting to rent baby's entire gear set - $12 a day for cribs, $7-15 a day for strollers, $7 a day for high chairs, etc. - but if you really hate schlepping, it might be worth it, and the prices to rent things like a jogging stroller for a fun day out are pretty reasonable. And they're smart about it - providing things like gates (great for rental houses), buckets of toys, beach items, and the like.

What do you think?

My Mommy Takes the Morning Train

The Metropolitoddler has recently discovered the joy of playing "work." I knew this would happen at some point. The visuals are hilarious -- she pulls her little chair over to one side of the room next to a big storage tub containing outgrown clothes and the like, sits back on her chair, props her feet up on the tub, and settles in with a book.

"What are you doing, sweetie?"

"I working. Please don't talk to me right now."

"What are you working on?"

"I doing work. I very busy."

A variation on this is tub as actual desk, with markers busily scribbling important work notations on construction paper. "I writing work things, Mommy."

I'm just waiting until she gets to be old enough to have some concept of what I actually do for a living. Then I'll get to hear her shouting things into the phone like "Sell, dammit, sell! Hit that bid and get back to me!" I can't wait.