The Twinkies

1. Should I be linking to you? Let me know. I try to link to any and all regular readers (which I can only know via comments) but if I’ve missed you, tell me.

2. Every time someone clicks on that ad it is like dropping a shiny quarter into the kids college fund. Since B. wants to send at least one of them to Northwestern, which is currently more than $40,000/year, we need all the quarters we can get. Just sayin’…

I asked what you were interested in, so, here goes. I’m starting with the easy ones.

What are your favorite places for baby clothes, as you have such great clothes?
I buy mostly from a small local store called Papaya Patch. The brands you mostly see are:

• Zutano, though I usually get them from a cheap ebayer because they are tres pricey.
• Hatley
• Kate Quinn
• Under the Nile
• Baby Legs
• Dulce

Where do you stand on television/videos for babies/toddlers?
I plan to follow the AAP guidelines and eschew television until they are two. After that, as little as possible.

Do you have any favorite books, and/or music for babies?
I love the Putomayo lullaby CDs Dreamland and Asian Dreamland. Actually, I am totally sick of them and if I never have to hear them again I would be happy, but they seem to work so I play one of them every night. I can’t stand anything with words in English because they end up stuck in my head. At least the songs in French and Chinese only run through my head as music, not lyrics.

I’m also a big fan of Sandra Boynton books, especially Moo Ba La La La. That gets them smiling every time. I think I quack very well. Another big favorite is Freight Train.

Oh, how does bath time work for you all? Do you do it in the real tub or somewhere else? Do you do it, your husband, a combination? Both kids at same time or separately?
We alternate kids, one per night. B. does the bathing. It is his special bonding time, a sort of male equivalent of nursing in our house. We are still using a small tub inside the regular tub, although they are about to outgrow it.

Ask yours. Maybe I can make a habit of twinny questions on Friday. stacie at bastetweb dot com

I think J.’s favorite food is bananas. He opens his mouth with great enthusiasm when I offer him mashed banana and looks pleased with the offering. This is not true with applesauce. I am happy about this because bananas, even organic bananas are cheap and easy to turn into baby food; mash with fork, stir in water until desired consistency. It doesn’t get much easier than that. Apples, for example, require cooking.

I am trying to only feed the babies organics. This isn’t difficult since Whole Foods is three blocks away. Pesticide usage contaminates our groundwater as well as the food it is sprayed on, and pesticides are, bluntly, poisons. The safe exposure level for infants and children for many of them are unknown. Childhood cancers jumped by 10.2% between 1973 and 1991. One in every 400 Americans can expect to develop cancer before the age 15. Scary shit. Using organics both limits my own children’s exposure to contaminants and helps just a little bit to decrease overall pesticide usage.

I am thinking about this today because my aunt may have cancer. She is the latest in a long line of people I know who have had cancer. Some have survived. Some have not. 40% of Americans can expect to get cancer in their lives. Forty percent. That’s a lot of people. Many of those are getting cancer because of exposure to environmental contaminants.

Suppose we assume for a moment that the most conservative estimate concerning the proportion of cancer deaths due to environmental causes is absolutely accurate. This estimate, put forth by those who dismiss environmental carcinogens as negligible, is 2 percent. Though others have placed this number far higher, let’s assume for the sake of argument that this lowest value is absolutely correct. Two percent means that 10,940 people in the United States die each year from environmentally causes cancers. This is more than the number of women who die each year from hereditary breast cancer - an issue that has launched multi-million dollar research initiatives. This is more than the number of children and teenagers killed each year by firearms - an issue that is considered a matter of national shame. It is more than three times the number of nonsmokers estimated to die each year of lung cancer caused by exposure to secondhand smoke - a problem so serious it warranted sweeping changes in laws governing air quality in public spaces. It is the annual equivalent of wiping out a small city. It it thirty funerals every day. (Steingraber, Sandra. Living Downstream. pages 268-269.)

You don’t know my aunt. She doesn’t post here, though she reads occasionally. However, if you are a pray-er, please send one to the deity with whom you commune on her behalf. It would mean a lot. And, if you can afford it, spend the extra money and get the organic fruit. Use non-toxic cleaners. Little changes made by many people become big changes.

I’ve got the babies growing older blues. The church is collecting supplies for St. Agnes, which is what would once have been called a home for unwed mothers, and I spent much of Monday packing up clothes the twins have outgrown. We don’t plan to have any more children and we live in a small house without a lot of storage so it is silly to keep things.

I am, of course, keeping some things. As much as the knocked-up sixteen-year-olds could probably use them, I have tucked away particularly sentimental items, including a minature pink sweater and one of the green “chili bags” they wore to bed as newborns. I’m not keeping much, though. I am not a saver. Still, it was melancholy to pack up sleepers that already seem impossibly small.

We were in Babies R Us and realized they have outgrown the “layette” section; it technically goes up to 9 months, but F. is long and Carter’s stuff is NOT preshrunk. They are growing. They are certainly mobile. This week J. has gone from kind of creeping along to almost crawling and F. has progressed from rolling towards her destination to creeping. It was actually rather impressive how she would roll, reorient herself to get lined up with her goal, then roll the rest of the way. I could watch her computing simple trajectories in her head. Of course, most of the time her goal seems to be the nearest electical cord; she is indefatigable in her quest to eat cords. Yesterday she manuevered herself under the couch and grabbed the 6 inches of exposed cord from the lamp and tugged on it. No baby-proofing can keep her from cords. I just don’t get the appeal.

Speaking of baby-proofing, I need to get on task with ordering more gates. And I need more flushable diaper liners. I finally committed to washing my own diapers and stocked up on Kissaluvs. Flushable liners are my friends as they catch any solid waste, which I can then lift out by the liner and, well, flush. This simplifies the laundry. Not having to fold the poorly named prefold diapers simplifies my week. I’d much rather do a load of laundry every day than fold those things and then try to keep them folded while slipping them under the bum of a very squirmy F. She’s an angel while I take the dirty diaper off but, as far as she’s concerned, that’s the end of the process. Putting on another diaper is never on her “to do” list. Eating cords, yes. New diapers, no.

Napping is another thing that seems to be low on her priority list. Too much to explore, too many cords to eat. “I’ll sleep when I’m dead, Mommy.” And, on that note, I am off to fetch her from her crib in hopes that her anti-nap protests have not woken J.

NOTE: Too late. She squeaked and cooed and chirped just long enough to ensure her brother was awake, ripped down her crib mirror, and fell asleep.

I am short on ideas. What do you want to know about life with 7-month-old twins? Ask me and I’ll answer.

…which explains his general neediness the past week or so.