You’ve probably heard of the chemical known as Bisphenol A, which lurks in various water bottles and beverage can liners and other products we regularly put in or near our food-holes. There doesn’t seem to be conclusive proof that this stuff is bad for us, but there’s certainly some worrying information out there.

To be honest, I haven’t spent a whole lot of time stressing over this issue because, I don’t know, I’ve got a finite amount of headspace to devote to the various subjects that freak me right the hell OUT. But I have started thinking about it lately, as I re-evaluated the bottles I’ve been using with my newborn. I used plastic bottles with Riley — I’d never even heard of BPA at that point — and I just figured I’d use the same ones with Dylan, but after warming a bottle for the fiftieth time the other day it occurred to me that I could make a fairly simple consumer choice to eliminate one more kid-related worry. Specifically, the nagging question of whether or not I was POISONING MY BABY with his bottle.

As I consider some of the plastics we use on a regular basis in our house, I’m thinking it wouldn’t hurt to upgrade to a safer alternative. Especially for the things we run through the dishwasher over and over, etc. Here are some of the kid-friendly, non-BPA products I’ve been looking at:
Read the rest of this entry »

I recently detailed my everyday makeup routine in order to recommend the various beauty products I’m addicted to, and since that writing I’ve gone and had myself a baby. As it turns out, newborns really put a cramp in a girl’s ability to primp, something about “needing to be fed and cared for all the time”. God, you’d think they were INFANTS or something.

Anyway, I thought I would post my Absolutely Must Have makeup items — the products I can slap on my face in twenty seconds if I’ve got two wailing children to attend to — and hopefully hear your own in response. I picked the three beauty products that would make the difference between feeling human and feeling like a train wreck if I were to, say, venture out in public.

(Those of you with naturally beautiful skin who never wear a stitch of makeup can watch from the sidelines, hopefully while sitting in gum. What? Come on, the universe needs to be unkind to you in SOME manner, don’t you think?)

Read the rest of this entry »

We had to do some major preparations house-wise to make room for a second child, but I really didn’t have to buy much — unlike the first time around, when I spent months on end pouring an endless stream of money into Amazon’s baby section. I was so paranoid I was going to forget some crucial item that would make the difference between a contented baby and a colicky nonstop screamer, as if clicking the Buy button was some kind of MAGIC WAND.

I kept pretty much everything we used from when Riley was a baby, with the exception of a few utterly useless items that I gave away. If you don’t mind veering from our normal blog M.O. of finding things that DON’T suck, here’s a rundown of baby gear I never did understand:
Read the rest of this entry »

You know what? I don’t like Valentine’s Day. It seems like there’s too much pressure to have some kind of uber-romantic, gooey day filled with expensive presents and chocolate, all for no particular reason. I mean, I’m not against holidays that advocate doing nice things for people for no particular reason (after all, as a godless heathen this pretty much describes Christmas for me), but there’s just something about the plethora of hearts and cards and ugly cheap jewelry that takes all of the fun out of it.

Since our household is still vibrating from the impact of having a newborn catapulted into it, I declared this year a collective Free Pass on Valentine’s Day participation. No presents, no flowers, no panicky last-minute shopping. However, as I was still languishing in bed yesterday morning feeding the baby, my husband sent our toddler racing into the bedroom to shout “HAPPY BALENTINE DAY MOMMY!” before thrusting a card in my hand. It featured some sweet words from my husband, as well as a few helpful scribbles from Riley.

Well MELT MY COLD BLACK HEART WHY DON’T YOU.

It got me thinking about a subject that’s perplexed me before: what do you do with your kid’s artistic creations, especially the ones you might actually want to hang onto? In honor of the more tolerable aspects of Valentine’s Day — specifically, the part where your children (or someone else on Behalf of the Children) do something cute for you — I’ve collected a few cool ideas for making keepsakes from such things:
Read the rest of this entry »

Okay, I am currently on a break from baby-wrangling so we can talk about a deeply important subject, people: HAIR. Specifically, how to make it look halfway decent when you don’t have the luxury of taking your sweet time with it. Like for instance when you’ve got a newborn making that constipated-sheep sound — beehhhh . . . beehhhhhhh — and a toddler saying, “Juice, Mommy? Juice? Milk? Juice? Milk?” over and over as though he were lost in the middle of the Sahara on the brink of dehydration rather than standing there with a cup full of water, which apparently is Unacceptable For Human Consumption.

I’ll tell you what works for my hair, which is an annoying combination of being curly underneath but straight on the outside. Unless it’s blow-dried and bitch-slapped into some semblance of smoothness I’ve got a head full of thick, yet limp frizziness. LAME. Here are my very favorite products for getting my hair as close to sleek and shiny as possible on a limited schedule:

Read the rest of this entry »

I recently wrote a post over at ParentDish about how capricious my kid’s approach to toys is — he’ll fall madly in love with one object and lust over it for a day or two, then abandon it altogether in favor of some other beguiling wonder.

I really try not to fall into the trap of buying too much crap for him, because if he’s not doling out equal attention to all of his stuff why should our house be jam-packed with it, you know? One two year old should not need the entire contents of a Toys R Us to make it through the afternoon, and yet it’s obvious I don’t always follow my own best intentions because toys, toys, TOYS. We have so very many of them, and the majority are things he doesn’t actively play with — he just hauls them out of the box every now and then in order to throw them around.

The best piece of advice I’ve ever received when it comes to dealing with Kid Crap Everywhere is to cycle through toys, and we have gotten pretty good about doing this. If you put about half of your kid’s playthings away somewhere long enough for the child to forget about them, you can bring them back out on some rainy day, and lo! The squeals of delight and wonder! This keeps the clutter to a minimum, and also gives you the opportunity to sneakily get rid of that battery-powered dancing Bob the Builder that Grandma gave him.

There are a few toys I always keep out, though, because for whatever reason they have staying power that the others don’t. The stuff I’ve found that he’s consistently interested in:

Read the rest of this entry »