Hello world!

Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!

Mother'ish Brooklyn Heads West

After a very lovely run here at True/Slant, it’s time for me to exit. The family is moving to Los Angeles (yes, even after I made fun of it) and I’m starting a new exciting job that promises to take every brain cell left after moving a family of four across the country.

While I’ll still be following the rest of the True/Slant’ers and interviewing them about this and that; this is my last post.

I hope you all have enjoyed the vaccination fights, the work/life, mom/dad balance rants, the sex talks and the completely random thoughts as much as I have.

True/Slant has an amazing community of writers and I could spend all day here. Alas, I’ve got to go figure out how many books and toys to pack vs. how many to hoard and pull out when the mid-flight meltdown happens. And it will happen.

Happy trails everyone! Thanks so much for reading.

Slutty, single mom blog

I’ve just discovered my new favorite mom blog, Ho Mama! There’s only one post, but it’s a doozy and a poignant, hilarious reminder that there are a lot of different moms out there and most of them aren’t arguing over plastic vs. wooden ride-on toys.

Is your kid more like you or your partner?

Other than the obvious superficial traits and unfair generalizations we make when they’re babies (I believe I’m guilty of saying to my husband, of our son, “He’s a horrible sleeper, just like you.”) it’s been impossible to say who your child will resemble more in a genetic sense. But not anymore!

A new genetic test by 23andMe will test your families spit for only $499 and let you know your child’s chances for inherited diseases, IQ and more!

Is the Hitler baby really art?

Danish-Norwegian artist Nina Maria Kleivan has chosen a graphic way of exploring the subject of evil. Kleivan, who herself was raised by a Norwegian father who had spent time in a German prison camp, dressed her baby daughter Faustina up as some of the most evil figures in the twentieth century and photographed her for an art project.

via Artist photographs baby daughter as Hitler – Judy Mandelbaum – Open Salon.

And I felt a little bad dressing up my son as a leprechaun because today is his birthday.

Instinctive Parenting: Q&A with Ada Calhoun

Founding editor-in-chief of Babble, Ada Calhoun, penned her own parenting book, Instinctive Parenting: Trusting Ourselves to Raise Great Kids that you can pick up in stores today. I used to work with Ada and her book is not unlike our “Can you believe that??” chats about modern parenting and the potential for insanity surrounding every single issue. Instinctive Parenting is a seriously fun romp through those querulous topics we love to chat about on message boards or at the bar where our babies are perched precariously on a stool (kidding, see below).

I sat down with Calhoun to discuss the new book, and those favorite and frightening parenting topics that make people froth at the mouth: Vaccines, Food, Home Ec, Baby Boomers and those other crazy parents. She obliged.

Why aren’t parents listening to their pediatricians?

Putting the mommy bloggers in their place

It’s not the content of this piece that’s making me feel like someone just shamed me for daring to write about parenting. The headline of this piece, Honey, Don’t Bother Mommy.  I’m Too Busy With My Blog and Building My Brand does a not so subtle job of telling mothers who actually work for a living they are doing something wrong.

What’s strange about the hed, is that the rest of the piece was an accurate description of what goes on in the mommy blogger world. The way moms are making money and building an audience on the web and what PR and marketing people are focusing on and how the relationship works. All very civilized, with the exception of this graf that makes fun of baby names and assumes that work-at-home moms are just looking for some “latte money.”

The politics of baby carriers

You know you’ve been writing about parenting for a long time when you pick up the New York Times and ask, “Is this actually news?”

Hardly new, wraps and other types of baby carriers are traditional in many parts of the world, and Western versions have been used in North America and Europe for decades. But lately, “wearing” one’s baby has taken on a certain cachet, with celebrities like Brad Pitt and Keri Russell pictured in star-gazing magazines and blogs with their babies strapped to their bodies. Upscale versions of the traditional baby carrier are sold in stores from SoHo to Santa Monica, Calif.

ON a breezy afternoon last week, a steady stream of women cruised through Metro Minis, an airy boutique on Park Avenue in Manhattan, which opened in 2007 and has since become the city’s hub for young mothers who collect baby carriers the way some women collect handbags.

via Baby’s Snuggled in a Sling, but Safe? – NYTimes.com.

Corey Haim, another dead child actor

Image via Wikipedia

Corey Haim is dead, Los Angeles Police confirmed to TV station KTLA. He was 38.

Police say it is believed the actor, who had a long history of substance-abuse problems, perished from an accidental overdose at 3:30 a.m. Wednesday.

via Corey Haim, 38, Found Dead – Tributes, Corey Haim : People.com.

I’ve written about child actors before and my reluctance of letting my own gregarious child enjoy the spotlight. Stories like this only confirm my irrational (?) fear of the child actor curse. I’ve been trying to come up with a list of “normal” adults that got their start as children to compare to the tragedies. The lists are not looking so hot.

The 'good old days' when kids just had to suck it up

“Back in my day, kids were kids! We worked out our problems on our own. We didn’t go crying to some stranger with a whole bunch of initials after his name.”

Gus was ridiculing a conversation a fellow therapist and I were having about a 13-year-old she was treating for depression and acute anxiety. I didn’t rise to his bait, but it wasn’t because I had no interest in defending my profession. Rather, as with the college guys at the other end of the bar lamenting yet another epic collapse by their beloved Jets (this was before the team got good), it was that I’d heard the complaint so often it had become tiresome.

via Cases – Fake Nostalgia for a Pre-Therapy Past – NYTimes.com.

I don’t know if you hang out with the same old codgers that I do, but this idea that today’s kids somehow have it better than any other generation (as if that’s a bad thing) seems to be whined about on a semi-regular basis. The rhetoric is kids will turn out to be “soft” rather than strong if they get support during these formative years. That assumption is not only inaccurate, it perpetuates a negative behavior pattern if that kid grows up never receiving the help he needs.