While the bedrooms of the neighbor's children just across the way are dark, save for a night light in the toddler's room, my three-year-old is wide awake. She isn't up past her bedtime. She doesn't have one.

She has those important rituals of bedtime, sure. She is bathed by me or my husband almost every night, her delicate skin covered first in lotion and then a set of fleecy pajamas. We'll generally settle in her bed to read stories, but sometimes in ours. She gets at least two books read every night — one per parent. On that, there is no negotiating.

What's fluid is the time.

Our daughter goes to bed when we do. And so in the hours after my husband comes home from the office and I finish up my work-at-home writing, we spend our time together. We eat dinner together — even if it's on the living room couch, with a dog staring hopefully at a butterfly-shaped plate set precariously on the edge of the coffee table.

That's why there's no bedtime in our household, why the seven o'clock hour does not turn our child into a screaming, writhing pumpkin who just wants another ten minutes to play with her toys or sit between Mommy and Daddy on the couch. We tried it a few times — the march upstairs to the bedroom, the tuck in, the request for water, the tuck in, the pleas to go potty again, the tuck in. Each night it would go on for an hour or two, her too keyed up for bed, us more exhausted by the minute.

Pretty quickly, we realized it wasn't just a rule we didn't like enforcing but one we saw no point in enforcing. If she was awake, why argue her into bed? Why spend our few hours together as a family every night manning our battle stations?

Commenting recently in the New York Times on the fact that President Barack and Michelle Obama enforce a strict eight p.m. bedtime for daughters Sasha and Malia, Dr. Judith Owens, who directs the Pediatric Sleep Disorders Clinic at Hasbro Children's Hospital, says parents unfortunately misjudge the appropriate bedtime because they think their kids need less sleep than they do. Owens says just 2.5 percent of the population needs significantly less sleep than average, but 95 percent of the population wrongly thinks it's in that 2.5 percent category.

But Dr. Perri Klass, who wrote the New York Times piece, points out that the sleep experts suggest "testing your routine by checking whether the child wakes spontaneously, alert and cheerful and ready for the day."

Mine does.

In fact, she still rises earlier in the morning than I do — because she generally still falls asleep before either her father or me, him because he stays up to check out the ESPN scores, me because after a bedtime story, I pick up the latest novel off of my bedside table and spend at least an hour decompressing with some escapist trash.

]]>Jeanne Sager http://www.babble.com/CNN-anchor-Campbell-Brown/Campbell Brown greets me over the phone so warmly, she could be mistaken for my best friend. "Hey!" she exclaims, with a light Southern lilt. It's that friendly approachability, along with a passion for getting to the heart of the news and some seriously killer cheekbones, that has propelled Brown from the field, where she's reported on the Iraq War, the Bush White House and Hurricane Katrina, into the anchor chair on her own eponymous news hour. (Campbell Brown airs weekdays at 8 p.m. on CNN.)

After taking a couple of months off following the birth of her second son, Asher, in April, Brown returned to the show in June with a renewed commitment to delivering more news and analysis, fewer soundbites, less shouting, and the sort of balanced take you'd expect from a program that was, until recently, subtitled, "No Bias, No Bull." "We pack in as much actual news as we can, rather than just giving one perspective," she says.

So how does she manage to tackle world issues on a daily primetime news show and raise two very young children (her older son, Eli, is just eighteen months old)? In the midst of a hectic workday, Babble caught up with the Louisiana native, who lives in New York City with her husband, Republican consultant Dan Senor, to discuss the challenges and rewards of having two under two, her mixed response to missed bedtimes, and why waking up with her baby at four a.m. is "heaven." — Amy Reiter

Welcome back from maternity leave. Was it hard to come back?

With two, everything's a little more challenging. My girlfriend just had a baby and was complaining of exhaustion with one child, and I was like, "Try two! You don't even know what it means."

So it's been a big change, going from one to two?

Absolutely. You go from a zone defense to man-on-man. There's never a moment when you can say, "Okay, we can relax." Two weekends ago, my sons were both napping at the same time, which almost never happens. And my husband and I looked at each other like, "Ah! We've got twenty minutes to ourselves!"

And you probably spent it unloading the dishwasher.

That's the problem. When you get those moments, you never just sit down and relax and appreciate them.

Have you restructured your work schedule to accommodate the new demands at home?

I have a really supportive work environment. My morning conference call is from home. And God bless technology for allowing me to be online and checking in at home and still be with the kids. When I come in, late morning, I'm gone for the rest of the day — I don't get to put them to bed at night — so I try to take a little extra time to be with them in the morning. Then my husband gets his time with them in the evening, putting my older son down to bed, giving him a bottle. The mornings are my time, having breakfast and playing and watching Sesame Street; you savor those moments. You really try to carve those out and protect them. And when the baby goes down for his nap, that's when I get on the phone or the computer and scramble.

Are you on call, too?

In the news business, you're always on call, because events are so unpredictable.

So do you have a whole contingency strategy?

I do. Especially with two, you develop a network of friends and family and help. I had a childcare emergency not too long ago, and my mom, God love her, came to the rescue. She spent a week with me. And there's nothing better than that. If you have family who can help you in those situations, it's the best thing in the world, because my son, there's no one he loves more than his grandmother.

I also have a really tight network of friends who have kids, some who work and some who stay at home. We really rely on each other. I think in New York City especially, because it's such a big city, you really do have to rely on your community of close friends to be a network that your family might be somewhere else.

I've found that to be true, too. But you don't get to put your kids to bed all week long? That's a toughie.

Yes and no. For those who have tried to put a toddler down . . . Sometimes I look at my husband and go, "Oh, here, you put him down for his nap." Yes, on the one hand you go, "Oh . . ." But don't idealize how wonderful it is to put your kids to bed. Sometimes they will fight you tooth and nail.

How has Eli reacted to having a little brother?

He's almost too young to really understand. He had about two weeks of acting out, where he couldn't figure out why he didn't have as much attention from mommy as he used to. But he's settled into it. He doesn't quite know who or what Asher is. It's just suddenly there's this blob hanging around with us who wasn't there before. But he's really sweet with him. He kisses him and holds his hand and points at him and says, "Asher."

You know, it can be tough when you've got two in cribs, two in diapers, two under two. You hope there will be a payoff, when they become friends. Everyone I've met who has a sibling that close in age has said, "Oh, we were best friends."

Yeah, having kids so close together is probably harder for the parents than the kids.

Sleep deprivation. But once you get beyond the first year, maybe . . .

Why did you drop the "No Bias, No Bull" tagline from your show when you came back? Maternal softening?

Oh, no, no, no. It was more we felt we had sort of said everything we needed to say with regard to that. We did it for a year, because we did want to differentiate ourselves from everything else that's on during that time, and the message was delivered. The audience knows who we are, which is a non-partisan, news-focused hour at eight o'clock.

Has your take on the news changed?

I think we've adjusted some of our coverage based on me taking a little break from the program, being on maternity leave and having a chance to watch as a viewer, which you don't always get to do, because you're so in it. I found as I was watching that I wanted more news, more information, more analysis about events and less opinion. I wanted our hour to deliver that. We pack in as much actual news as we can, rather than just giving one perspective.

Maybe everyone should take a maternity leave from time to time, come back with a new perspective. Has motherhood changed your worldview?

Absolutely. You think of everything in terms of your children. The world seems more fragile to me. I worry much more because I'm so protective. You have that mama-bear instinct, so the world seems scarier than it did when I was single, because I have these two people who are totally dependent on me.

Are there stories that you gravitate toward more now that you're a mother and others that you feel less interested in?

My interest has always been hard news, the news that shapes our world. I've never really had an interest in tabloid stories. The stories I cover affect us all and the future we're giving our kids. So it hasn't necessarily meant a change in stories. But my kids do make me more emotional about certain things than I was before. I cry at sappy Hallmark commercials. Someone recently pitched a story about a puppy that got hurt and I was like, "You know, no. If my son saw that on TV, he'd be devastated. I don't want to do that."

Do you miss the career freedom you had before kids, being able to take assignments in far-off lands and dangerous places?

No. I mean, I loved that as a journalist. I feel like I've truly had that experience — from Baghdad to the Middle East to Hurricane Katrina to traveling with former President Bush when I was a White House Correspondent — so I don't feel like I've missed out. But at the same time, when there's a big story, you want to be part of it. I'm so fortunate in being at CNN because the resources here are unparalleled. So no matter what the story, be it the elections in Iran or what's happening on the streets there now, I feel like we can cover these stories even though I'm in the anchor chair and not out there in the field.

Is it difficult to shift focus back and forth from the big issues of the world to the quotidian concerns of childcare?

Not so much. I think a mother's brain works differently. We can be refilling the sippy cup while doing our conference call at the same time. You learn to compartmentalize. You learn to multitask. It's how you survive. You learn little tricks, and sometimes it feels like you're managing perfectly and sometimes it all falls apart. But at the end of the day, you wouldn't give up either. Nothing's more important than your family, and when you have a job like I have, a job that I love that's so rewarding, you do whatever you can to make it all work.

Are there things you've learned as a mother that you use on TV, and vice versa?

You definitely learn patience. Style-wise, I think when I was a younger correspondent, certainly at the White House, I was maybe more aggressive about my approach to stories or to questioning guests, and since I've gotten older, and this may have something to do with motherhood, I'm less interested in the combative aspect of that and much more interested in trying to find common ground where possible. That's in fact become part of our show. We're extending more of our panels and interviews to let people make their case without being cut off and without it becoming a shout-fest and to try to dig a bit deeper than the soundbite of the day. It's not always black and white. It's not right and left. There's a lot of gray and a lot of diversity of opinion. And I want to hear that.

You and your husband are from very different backgrounds. How does that come into play as you raise your kids?

I think different perspectives enrich the experience as a family. But you have to be a team. It's the only way you can make it work.

Before you got married, you converted to Judaism. How do you feel about raising your children in a different religion than you grew up in?

I grew up Catholic, but my immediate family was not really religious. I wanted to give my children religion. I wanted them to have that grounding, and I wanted help in terms of teaching my children morality. I didn't want to have to figure this out on my own. It's too big and too important. I think the Jewish traditions are beautiful. I'm very lucky in that it was a decision that both of our families supported. We are learning as a family and devising our traditions because, as you say, our backgrounds are so diverse. I grew up in Louisiana. My husband grew up in the Northeast. So you have to be flexible and open to hearing other perspectives. It's a learning process not only for my kids but also for me. And it's one that so far I can honestly say I've enjoyed every minute of.

You've mentioned in previous interviews these culture-clash moments — I'm thinking of when you brought your husband for Thanksgiving for the first time to your grandmother's house and she had nothing but shellfish and pork on the menu. Is that still happening?

Not only have I been educated, but so has my family. Believe me, they no longer offer Dan shellfish and pork for every meal, but they're from Louisiana, so shellfish was our diet. Our families are so good-spirited and very curious to learn about the different worlds. For the last few Thanksgivings both my family and his family have come to our place and they've become close friends. Not too long ago his cousins went to visit my family unbeknownst to us. These are his Jewish cousins from Toronto going to see my Catholic cousins from Louisiana. It's so wonderful that they have developed these friendships that aren't just about Dan and me.

Your husband is a Republican consultant and "no bias" is really important for you in your work. How do the politics play out at home?

There's so much diversity of opinion around our dinner table it's not even funny. I have always approached the issues as a journalist. It's my nature. It's who I am. It's what I do. And it's never really been an issue. And my husband is not as involved in a partisan way as he was. He's now a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He's been working on a book about Israel. He's not as involved in the political world. It just doesn't dominate our lives. In all honestly, when you have children, they tend to become the focus of conversation more than anything else.

What's been the very best part of being a mother for you, and what have you found to be the greatest challenges?

The best thing about being a mother are those moments that are just you one-on-one with your little ones. Eli, my toddler, was pitching a fit the other day because I wouldn't give him a snack food, some brownie or something that he saw in the pantry. He was throwing himself on the floor, screaming, yelling, and I was just — ugh! — at my wit's end. I finally plopped down on the couch and took a deep breath. And he just stopped crying, came over, put his arms around me, and gave me a kiss on the cheek and a big hug — for no reason, after pitching this horrible, horrible fit. And I thought, God, this is heaven.

My newborn, Asher, wakes up usually around 4:15 a.m., and my husband is like, "Oh, that's so awful that you're still getting up at 4:15 with the baby." He doesn't really understand that that is my most precious twenty minutes, because it's just our moment together. It's quiet. No one else is awake. And it is heaven. The older one does get jealous, so it's really the only time that I can give complete and total attention to Asher. And I just treasure that time, at four a.m. Those little moments are what's wonderful about motherhood.

Wow, you may be the only person in the history of motherhood who has waxed poetic about the 4:15 a.m. wakeup call.

I'm lucky that he's only getting up once a night. If it were twice a night, I probably wouldn't be waxing poetic about it.

What have you learned since becoming a mother that you wish someone had told you at the outset?

Have a sense of humor. Because no matter how organized you are, no matter how much you plan, no matter how much you think you've got it all figured out, it's never going to go like you want it to go all the time. Often things are going to blow up in your face and your kids are going to look at you and say, "Really? You think I'm going to do what you want me to do?" You've just got to have a sense of humor about it. Otherwise, you'll drive yourself crazy.

Dear ATEOMR,

It sounds like you're stuck between a rock and a holier-than-thou place.

Our advice in this case is very straightforward. You need to get help. What you are experiencing is real and potentially dangerous -- to you and your children. Your husband's beliefs are real to him too, but it doesn't sound like you necessarily share them, and it definitely doesn't sound like they're giving you the help you need in this situation. Whether or not it's even possible for postpartum depression to be remedied by faith alone is questionable. But you don't have time for questioning.

You need help. Now.

Perhaps if your husband is averse to formal psychotherapy, you could pursue a postpartum support group or a general new mom's group and use that to segue into more personalized care if necessary. The group leader should be able to direct you to resources, or perhaps even help you work through some of your issues directly. It's not clear how connected you feel to the spiritual side or what the belief system in play is, but perhaps it could be helpful to discuss your concerns with a religious leader. You'll have to gauge whether you think this could be helpful or would simply reinforce your husband's position. The denial of mental illness (or its interpretation as a moral failing) by the clergy is pretty common and can be an impediment on the path to care.

You may have more luck going straight to your medical doctor, or even your child's pediatrician, to say you're worried about being depressed. Your children's welfare is at stake, and depression is well within the purview of the medical profession. Some doctors are much better talking about these matters than others, so you may need to push a bit if you're not getting a response -- or look elsewhere.

Your husband's attitude is almost definitely contributing to your depression. There's quite a bit of research suggesting that postpartum depression is exacerbated, if not caused, by a serious lack of support. It's one thing to feel overwhelmed, and another to feel that your concerns aren't being taken seriously. To be called lazy on top of it adds a layer of antagonism that makes us worry.

We rarely suggest that one partner operate behind the other's back. But if you have reason to believe that your husband will stand in the way of you pursuing help, we urge you to work around that, even if it means doing it without his knowledge. Are there other people in your community you can trust and lean on for emotional and logistical support during this time? Do you have friends who will care for your children while you seek counseling? Can you reach out online, or via a phone hotline? There are some great resources available to point you in the right direction for deeper support; we've listed some below. A phone call is a great place to start. There are many other wonderful mothers out there who have been through this before and can guide you to the kind of support you need.

Once you have reached a level of equilibrium for yourself, you can consider whether you want to go back to your husband and talk to him about his role in your emotional life. If he's not hearing this cry for help, he may need to work on his listening skills.

Here are some excellent resources:

Postpartum Progress is an amazing website that includes many links to other resources — groups, hotlines, books, etc — as well as a piece addressing religion and postpartum depression.

Christian PPD Support offers help to a specifically Christian community.

Have a question? Email parentaladvisory@babble.com. Questions submitted may be used for publication.

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The morning I woke up next to him, I still had my clothes on and my virtue intact. We lay in bed staring up at the ceiling, talking about this and that. For some reason, I jokingly asked how many children he had, not thinking there was any answer. He told me five hundred, which he then modified to three, and then told me their ages. Twenty-one. Eighteen. Two. I lay there shocked for a few seconds, but adjusted quickly and looked up at the ceiling some more. Then he mentioned Claudia and her age, again, and asked if this was scary for me. At that point he could have told me that he was married and it wouldn't have shocked me and so, when he told me he was still married, it was par for the course. Claudia was born after they'd separated. They didn't want to stay together, but they didn't want to leave her behind.

Tim and I have now been dating for a year. His divorce papers have finally been signed and Tim is ready to ease me into the role of Daddy's special friend. I've only seen Claudia twice, for a few moments in passing. Today is the third time. Our day started with her nap — her sleepy, soft self and blond braid, lying still on my bed where he'd arranged her on top of a towel over a sheet of plastic because she is learning to do without diapers. After the nap, and some playtime, we head out for a picnic at Gasworks Park, and watch the boats sliding back and forth on their tacks. The wind is warm, the sun carries the scent of blackberries. Claudia, after her short coloring session on the floor of my kitchen, is curious about everything, especially me.

We head over to the swings and the slides. I am surrounded by the normal, non-inquiring glances of children and parents. Here we are, just another family on the playground: Tim, a marked baby boomer dad with his silver and dark hair, taut legs in khaki shorts and no inhibitions, paired with me, a twenty-something version of Claudia. And Claudia, running free, easy, wild, and independent, rosy as an apricot, a gypsy child whose hair must be taken out of barrettes at her own insistence so that she can feel it in the wind. She knows the sensuality of this feeling at age three. I hold back, having never spent a full day with her, and I'm still sensitive of making my mark and upsetting the fragile ecosystem of it all. I like the two of them together, and I know that he should have this kind of carefree activity every day but doesn't. I watch how free he is with her and how every interaction is a subtle lesson. "How many geese are over there by the stone wall?" he asks her. "Count them for me!" And she does.

At the playground I see the happy babies and parents and I wonder why I'm so ill at ease. There are so many reasons that could answer it, but they aren't my reasons exactly, they are the reasons someone else would think of. I try them on for size. One is that I loved this when I was little and that my father was every bit as loving and attentive as Tim. Am I pining for my childhood? Next is the baby I haven't had. This man, my lover, would love my child just as much as he loves Claudia. This idea feels tempting but in a slightly queasy way. I'm not eager to give birth. Perhaps, I think, it is because I love to watch her love him, and depend upon him with perfect confidence. Maybe it is the fact that they're part of a family that's breaking up but because of this little girl will still be ironclad, even if they are divorcing. Claudia gives me little looks and questioning glances, shy smiles and bold grins. She's a tiny chameleon with flowing blond hair, wearing nothing but a shirt and panties.

Our next stop is Murphy's restaurant, where Claudia is in a touching mood. She is all over Tim. We eat French fries together and Tim and I drink beer. Across the table, they are in another world from me — sitting next to each other and loving each other. I listen to Tim say that she is his baby, that she is so pretty. He lets her put his glasses on him backwards and upside down. I see him run his finger in a straight line from the top of her forehead to the end of her nose. It is a familiar gesture, an absentminded caress that he performs on my face as well. I see the gestures, hear the cadences of his voice with her, the same ones he uses on me, and wonder if he treats everyone like a child or does he love me because I am childlike?

And we sit in Murphy's, a group of three that is broken up into two and one. I think that Tim really must be okay with everything ending if he's bringing the three of us to a public place, a bar where his friends go. Is this his first rebellious act of freedom after signing away his home to his ex-wife? I am thinking all sorts of things, and watching a boxing show on the twin TVs, when Tim prompts Claudia to come sit on my lap. This would have been nice if she'd thought of it herself, but I don't believe she did. Soft and warm, the baby is on my lap for a mere second or two before she reaches out for the man whose duty she has done. Not a good way to teach a child to be true to herself, even if he thought it would please me.

Tim called immediately after dropping me off at home. When I answered the phone, he said, "I worry about you when you're quiet." I told him I wished he hadn't prompted her to sit on me. He swore that she did it all on her own, and that she had total trust in me. I lay back on my couch. Was I ready to have a child in my life?

Ultimately, I made the leap. Falling in love with a man means embracing his world. My sense of unease disappeared. Claudia and I developed a mutual adoration for each other, and for the following two years Tim and I stayed together, she and I spent a great deal of time together on our own. The problem was that I eventually fell out of love with Tim. When I left him, he disallowed all contact between me and his daughter, which was his right, but truly painful. I heard from a mutual friend that finally, after a year, Claudia stopped asking for me, but I still think about her. Perhaps the root of the unease I sensed upon meeting her was that leaving Claudia would be a thousand times more painful than leaving Tim.

It's noon on Sunday, and as usual, I'm sitting at the kitchen table having lunch with my fourteen-month-old son and his grandparents. It's our weekly ritual, one that has become indispensable to all of us: I can take a precious few moments to catch up with my parents between cutting peanut butter sandwiches and retrieving dropped sippy cups, they get to dote on Nico and see how he's changed over the past week, and he gets to entertain his adoring fans, for whom everything he does is brilliant and hysterical. But when Nico tries to feed a piece of his sandwich to his grandfather, things get weird.

See, Grandma and Grandpap are 1,200 miles away. We maintain our weekly lunch date — and our familial bond — almost exclusively online, via Skype. Grandpap leans toward the screen, wiggling his moustache for effect, mouth wide open to accept whatever slimy, half-chewed morsel of food his grandson offers. And Nico, giggling expectantly, leans in closer and closer till I have to pull the laptop back to keep him from smearing jam across the screen. It's a sweet, silly exchange between them, which, like so much time spent with a baby, is not about doing anything significant, but rather just being together in the moment. But none of us quite knows what to do when our virtual relationship runs up against such literal walls.

Nico rolls with it, of course, and moves on to smashing kiwifruit into his hair. He is part of a brave new generation, one for whom communicating in this way that once seemed so impossible, so Jetsonian, is a purely quotidian experience. Nearly everyone I know whose kids have out-of-town grandparents does some sort of online video-calling, and a recent New York Times article documented just this phenomenon. But quotidian or not, I wonder about what it means for our relationships.

We travel to be together in person whenever we can, but the very reason for the more frequent visits — my son — makes traveling much more logistically challenging, not to mention more expensive. And my parents, like so many other baby-boomer grandparents, are younger and healthier than those of previous generations; they'd love nothing more than to be involved in their grandson's life, but also like many others of their generation, they find themselves having to work later in their lives and lack the leisure time or financial security to travel often.

In some ways, these concerns seem so very . . . I don't know, twentieth century. We are all, of course, mind-bogglingly hyper-connected in this postmodern era. With web cams and an internet connection, we can in fact see our family whenever we want; Nico certainly spends more time online with his grandparents than I did face-to-face with mine. But the paradox of this intense connectivity is that it's always coupled with reminders of the actual distance between us: the limits of battery life and bandwidth are nagging indices of the miles from the Midwest to the East coast, and the inevitable technical glitches can make our online visits feel as alienating as they are enjoyable.

I recently wrote a letter to my own grandmother on the occasion of her ninetieth birthday, reminiscing about my earliest memories of her and reflecting on the pleasures of the grandparent-grandchild relationship. What struck me while writing was how physical my memories of her are, how many of them involve touch and smell and presence. Watching Nico interact with his grandparents online, it becomes clear just how challenging it is to create a relationship with a child (especially a pre-lingual child) when those elements of physicality are removed. They've risen to the challenge as admirably as anyone possibly could, honing their performance skills and developing an arsenal of visual entertainment techniques to rival any children's television host.

They're a comedic duo, with Grandpap playing the straight man in Grandma's routines: she dresses him in funny hats, tugs on his ears and nose, feeds him with a huge wooden spoon — they do whatever it takes to get a busy toddler engaged with a twelve-inch screen. And there is genuine joy in the experience, on both sides. But our visits are always tinged by a certain sadness. When we end our weekly calls, my parents' longing is almost palpable — my mother frequently signs off by saying something like, "Oh, Nico, why don't you just come over for the rest of the afternoon? We can walk to the park and swing on the swings" in a faux-cheerful voice. And I find myself missing more substantive conversations with them, especially now, since being at sea in the world of parenting has given me such a different perspective on them as people.

Having a baby made me value my family in new and unexpected ways; and after Nico was born, the miles between us and his grandparents seemed to stretch open like some yawning, indifferent beast. To be sure, Skype makes that distance feel a little less beastly. And for Nico, whose days are immersed in imaginative play, maybe navigating that distance virtually is not such a perilous undertaking. Regardless, even five years ago we could have only traversed it in that old-fashioned, embodied way to be together at holidays and for significant family events; so for now, we're all grateful for those Sunday lunches, and for lovely moments of inconsequential togetherness, virtual or not.

When it proved almost impossible to get through on the phone, I resorted to email. And when my friends' replies started trickling in, I felt inordinate relief. They reported that their kids were still going to classes as usual, and that the scenes of burning streets broadcast on television were confined to particular areas where protesters were clashing with police. "The kids are still playing soccer at the end of our alley," one friend wrote to me. "Life in our neighborhood is the same as always."

Eventually it grew easier to call, and in conversations I learned that school wasn't even in session. Some parents had their kids enrolled in summer classes, and those were being held as usual. This year, I was told, the authorities had ended the school term earlier than usual to accommodate the June 12 election. Apparently things work this way in Iran every four years when the country holds a presidential election — the term ends early so that children are safely ensconced at home by the time voters head to the polls. Why this is no one can quite explain, as until this June Iranian elections were tidy affairs. Children often went along with parents to voting stations, and the exercise felt like one enormous administrative task.

But Iran is a country where politics are fluid, and in this instance holding an election during summer school holiday seems like brilliant state planning. On week days Tehran is locked in the most heinous traffic imaginable — traffic so snarled and unrelenting that it makes rush hour in Los Angeles seem light in comparison. Extricating children from school is a daily anxiety that parents manage with the aid of taxi shuttles and long walks. For over an hour after class lets out, the streets around the city's numerous schools are flooded with young girls in maroon-colored hoods — the authorities recently relented and now allow elementary-school age girls to wear veils in colors like cream and powder blue, rather than the grim greys and olives of years past --- searching the car-jammed streets for parents or shuttles. Had the election protests erupted during the school term, it's painful to even imagine what would have transpired for kids and their terrified parents.

Summer vacation, however, has created other challenges for families with kids. Before the state began repressing demonstrations so viciously, parents who wanted to attend traded baby-sitting shifts so that they could join the marchers peacefully calling for the election results to be annulled. These absences, and the palpable sense that something was quite wrong, had kids asking questions that even adults were hard-pressed to answer. "Cheating is really bad," my cousin's 8-year-old said plaintively. "Why would the president cheat?" Another friends' daughter couldn't fathom why a government would ignore its citiziens' grievances. "If everybody is so upset, why don't they just listen?" she demanded of her mother, perplexed with the opaque answers she'd been receiving. Given Iran's history of democratic protest and violent revolt, parents could do with a volume like "Revolutionary Parenting: How to Talk to Your Kids About Political Unrest." But the country's parenting culture doesn't rely yet on books for guidance (though TV programs on children's psychology are hugely popular), and most parents look to the lessons they received as a child.

When the crisis in Iran first began to unfold, I tried to hide my turbulent feelings from my two-year-old son. I dashed into the kitchen to cry, pretended I had hay fever, and anything else I could think of to explain why I was red-eyed days on end. But my son, like all children, refused to be out-witted. He stood in front of the television news, arms akimbo, demanding to know why there were fires in Iran. Though I knew a two-year-old would have no ability to absorb anything I might tell him about Iran's political reality, I decided it was worse trying to hide the truth from him.

After all, I had grown up in the early years after Iran's 1979 revolution, and vividly remember my family sitting in the kitchen late into the night, weepy or angry. This is our destiny as Iranians, I concluded, to be attached to a homeland that is still experiencing massive political upheaval. This instability meant anguish for my parents' generation, and it looked like it would mean that for mine also.

Sooner or later my son would understand that he was Iranian, and that the country of his birth differed vastly from the modern Western society where he was being raised. A place where, in the words of the critic James Wood, the day's "most arduous choice has been between 'grande' and 'tall.'" I learned that Iran was a rich but fraught nation while playing with Barbies in California. I think this knowledge helped prepare me for understanding the conflicts that grip much of the world beyond the affluent, democratic West. I gave a report in my sixth grade class in Cupertino about the Iran-Iraq War, and felt for much of my childhood that my home — though a place where people were glued to the news and wept about it — was somehow also a window onto the world.

I sat my son down with some bread-sticks and apple juice, and did the same thing my friends in Tehran were doing. I tried to explain as simply and gently as I could that sometimes people in power, just like people on the playground, behaved awfully. Because my son adores Thomas the Tank Engine, the island world of Sodor supplied a useful context for our talk. The Fat Controller, or Sir Topham Hatt, wields a kindly authority over his stable of trains; Thomas, Percy, and the other engine admire him for his justness. Presidents of countries, I explained, must be fair to their people, just as Sir Topham Hatt is fair to his trains. My son took this all in gravely, nodding. These days, however, he's mostly concerned about Iran's phone lines. Why are they broken? Is it the wires? Why don't they send a repair man to fix them?

Tired of ho-hum beaches and less-than-thrilling children's museums? These family-friendly vacation spots are weird, wonderful and anything but ordinary. — Christina Couch

21. Foamhenge, Natural Bridge, Virginia

Our kids may not be able to comprehend the true weirdness of an exact replica of mysterious prehistoric stones made out of foam located in rural Virginia, but they're sure to have a blast at the site's annual medieval Enchantment Faire. Kicking off September 6th and 7th, this year's Enchantment Faire will feature costume fairies, a unicorn-themed ring toss, a sheep-throwing competition (thankfully without live animals) and peddlers hawking medieval wares. Get ready to geek out. Admission is $5.

20. A.C. Gilbert's Discovery Village, Salem, Oregon
World's largest Erector set: check. Dig for prehistoric mammoth bones: check, Step inside a giant animal cell: check. All in a day's work in A.C. Gilbert's stranger-than-strange backyard. Half children's museum, half playground, Discovery Village is home to the country's only child-sized grocery store, a room dedicated exclusively to bubble-making, and a room that lets kids freeze and manipulate their own shadows. Admission is $5.75.

19. Rockome Gardens, Arcola, Illinois

Why hit the beach this summer when you can play tic-tac-toe with a live chicken? Located approximately three hours south of Chicago in the heart of Amish country, this children's park and historical re-enactment town features Ben Franklin impersonators, WWII re-enactments (complete with tanks!) and a horse-powered saw mill children can ride. Tickets are $8 for adults, $4 for kids under twelve.

18. Wizard Quest, Wisconsin Dells
Cynical parents who enter these doors may not be able to keep a straight face. Located in a 13,000-square-foot climbable labyrinth (known in the game as the "Quadrasphere"), Wizard Quest is essentially a 4-D computer game that presents children with questions and riddles (spoken from the lips of dragons of course), the correct answers of which release imprisoned wizards . . . naturally. Packed with secret passages, animatronic sorcerers and a mysterious "Gnome Depot" (no idea what happens there), Wizard Quest will be equally enjoyable for kids and snarky adults. Tickets are $13 for adults, $11 for kids.

17. RoboWorld, Carnegie Science Center, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Prepare your human offspring for the robot revolution by showing them the largest permanent robot-themed exhibit in the world. Led by Andy, a socially interactive "Robo-Thespian," RoboWorld features hockeybots, artificial intelligence bots, lunar rovers, computerized foosball tables, service bots and mechanical men that create art. Kids will have the chance to play b-ball against a robot. Parents will learn how close we are to a machine takeover. Tickets are $14.

16. City Museum, St. Louis

A fantasy come true for adventurous kids, a nightmare for overprotective parents, City Museum is half novelty museum (featuring oddities such as the world's oldest corn dog and the world's largest pair of underwear), half dream playground. With hands-on attractions including walls with secret passageways, an indoor skateless skate park where kids swing from ramp to ramp with overhead ropes, an outdoor playground comprised of mesh wire tubes suspended twenty-five feet in the air, and a bar for stressed-out parents, City Museum is both totally awesome and completely terrifying. On weekend nights after ten, City Museum shuts off the lights and hands out flashlights. Kids and adults can climb around suspended cave-like structures in the dark until 1 a.m. Admission is $12, $10 after 5 p.m. on weekends.

15. Insectropolis, Toms River, New Jersey

Many zoos and museums offer insect exhibits, but only one combines the beauty of bugs with the terror of prison. At Insectropolis' permanent Rock State Prison exhibit, children learn first-hand just how many bugs out there can kill them. Divided into categories like "Six-Armed Bandits" and "Mass Murderers," the exhibit presents kids with dossiers of villain bugs that are dangerous to humans. The upside to surviving Rock State Prison is that it makes Insectropolis' bug petting zoo (featuring Rosie the Touchable Tarantula) a little less scary. Tickets are $7.

14. Museum of Questionable Medical Devices, St. Paul, Minnesota

Located within the Science Museum of Minnesota, this collection pays homage to medical forms of fraud, quackery, deception and deceit. Featuring devices ranging from the Foot-Powered Breast Enlarger to the McGregor Rejuvenator, a contraption that used magnetism, UV and infrared rays to supposedly reverse the aging process, this hands-on collection allows kids to try on fake medical equipment and take pot shots at past generations. Tickets are $11 for adults, $8.50 for kids.

13. Metropolis, Illinois

Sure, there hasn't been a good Superman movie since the '80s, but that hasn't stopped the citizens of Metropolis — the only town in the world dedicated to the Man of Steel — from placing a fifteen-foot statue of the superhero in the middle of town, as well as a Super Museum. Metropolis' Superman Celebration 2009 (June 11th through 14th, 2009), the largest Superman-themed event in the country, will feature an array of comic book authors, celebrity guests, a Superman Fan baseball game (Metropolis Marvels vs. Smallville Meteors), video and musical tributes and not one, but several Superman-themed game shows.

12. Aircraft Boneyard, Tucson, Arizona

Located literally around the Pima Air and Space Museum on the Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, the 309 Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group — better known as the Aircraft Bone Yard — features seventy-five acres of aircrafts and aerospace vehicles currently being reserviced, regenerated or stripped for parts by the U.S. Air Force. The three to four-hour "Boneyard Tour" takes families through 4,400 piloted machines from the Air Force, Navy-Marine Corps, Army, Coast Guard and NASA. Tickets for the Pima Museum are $15 for adults, $9 for kids ages seven to twelve. Boneyard tour tickets are $7 per person.

11. International UFO Museum and Research Center,
Roswell, New Mexico
Dedicated to all things alien, this tiny museum explores what happened in the 1947 Roswell UFO incident, as well as the history of "human contact with aliens," including crop circles and testimony from UFO abductees. The on-site research library lets future alien hunters dig deeper into the paranormal. Tickets are $5 for adults, $2 for kids.

10. Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum, Farmington Hills, Michigan

Admission is free, but bring some change. With 5,500 square-feet of coin-operated heaven, Marvin's Marvelous Mechanical Museum is the alpha and omega of arcades. Machines date back to the early 1900s. The highlight is a fifty-five-piece mechanical orchestra that still plays over 300 songs, but other winners are the old-timey gypsy fortune tellers and an electric chair supposedly from Sing-Sing prison.

9. International Spy Museum, Washington D.C.
The first and only public museum in the United States solely dedicated to espionage, the International Spy Museum is paradise for James Bond wannabes. While the museum exhibits are undeniably cool — think everything from ninjas to Cold War-era satellites — the real highlight is the scavenger hunts, kid-friendly spy missions, speakers and workshops designed to give first-hand accounts of how it feels to live the spy life. Adult tickets are $18, kids are $15.

8. Dinosaur Ridge, Morrison, Colorado
If sifting soil in search of the decayed remains of dead creatures doesn't turn your stomach, have we got a spot for you. Home to some of the best-known dinos, including Apatosaurus, Diplodocus, Stegosaurus, and Allosaurus, Dinosaur Ridge lets kids "examine Cretaceous crime scenes" in the on-site Dig Pit. Admission is free, tours are $3 per person.

7. Salem Witch Museum, Salem, Massachusetts

Even looking past all the torture and death, the Salem Witch Museum (located in a creepy, gothic castle-like structure) is still kind of scary. Children eager to learn about that time in history when our country burned women for no discernable reason will be delighted/terrified by the museum's theatrical presentations and their life-size mannequins. The current "Witches: Evolving Perceptions" exhibit focuses less on people-burning and more on modern-day witchcraft. Adult tickets are $8, children's are $5.50.

6. Trash-o-saurus, Stratford, Connecticut
Located in the Museum of Garbage (one of two museums in Connecticut dedicated to refuse), this one-ton, twenty-foot dinosaur is made of the same amount of garbage the average consumer creates each year. In addition to extinct creatures made from waste, the museum also offers hands-on exhibits and family workshops that promote green living. Admission is $2 per person, but possibly not for long. The museum is in danger of closing due to lack of funding.

5. Creation Museum, Petersburg, Kentucky

What's surprising about this Bible-centric museum/petting zoo is how many dinosaurs are roaming about. On top of permanent exhibits that focus on natural selection, the construction of Noah's Ark and the Garden of Eden, the museum also hosts daily family-friendly presentations on topics like "Snakes Alive! (a look at reptiles from God's perspective)" and "Four Power Questions to Ask an Evolutionist." Whether you agree or not with the politics behind Creation Museum, it's still one of the only sites in the country that features a live zebra-donkey hybrid. Long live the zonkey. $22 for adults, $12 for kids.

4. Winchester Mystery House, San Jose, California

All the charm of a Victorian mansion combined with all the whimsy of Pee Wee's Playhouse. According to legend (and the web site), the former owner of this 160-room mansion kept carpenters working round the clock for thirty-eight years in an effort to stave off evil spirits. Whether or not the plan worked, Winchester Mystery House is an architectural marvel packed with functionless features including windows buried in floorboards, stairs that lead nowhere and doors that open to blank walls. $26 for adults, $23 for children or $23 for a behind-the-scenes tour (hardhat required).

3. Craters of the Moon, Arco, Idaho

A national park roughly the size of Rhode Island, Craters of the Moon was a bed of molten lava just 2,000 years ago. Today the site, made predominantly of crusted lava, looks almost post-apocalpytic. It's peppered with underground caves (called lava tubes), and is a guaranteed geek freakout for young scientists. Admission is $8 per vehicle, $4 for those on bikes, motorcycles or on foot, free for ages 15 and under.

2. Santa Claus, Indiana
Christmas only comes once a year everywhere except for Santa Claus, Indiana. Home to the Santa Claus Museum, Santa's Lodge motel and Santa's Candy Castle — a sweets shop that not only sells confections, but also personalized phone calls from Santa year-round — Santa Claus also receives over half a million letters each year addressed to St. Nick himself. The biggest attraction in town is Holiday World and Splash Safari, a Christmas-Halloween-Thanksgiving-all-rolled-into-one themed amusement park that vastly overshadows Frosty's Fun Center, the Christmas-themed mini-golf course just a few minutes away.

1. Professor Cline's Dinosaur Kingdom, Natural Bridge, Virginia
What would have happened if Union troops had used dinosaurs as weapons of mass destruction against the South? It's a question historians have pondered for ages. Thankfully, one outdoor sculpture park in nowheresville, Virginia, is dedicated to solving the mystery. Featuring sculptures of life-sized dinos attacking old-timey soldiers (an excellent sepia-toned photo is available here), Professor Cline's Dinosaur Kingdom and adjacent Haunted Monster Museum (featuring "no scare" tours for kids) is well worth the $8 ticket ($5 for kids).

I first learned of this policy about a month before my due date, when my husband and I took a tour of the facility. The nurse showed us one of the post-delivery rooms, letting us marvel at just how un-hospital-like it seemed. And then, as we left the room, she gestured briskly at the hospital's nursery: "But you and your babies hopefully won't be seeing much of that. Our expectation is that babies will be sleeping beside their moms. The nursery is only used for babies experiencing medical complications."

At the time, this sounded great. After waiting nine-plus months to meet the baby of my dreams, why would I possibly want to ship him off to a sterile, fluorescent-lit nursery where I wouldn't be able to stare into his eyes or caress his little hands or cuddle him against my chest? Provided the guy was in good health, why would I not want him beside me every moment of those first few days? In other words, our hospital's rooming-in policy seemed like little more than common sense . . . until, that is, I gave birth.

I know that labor isn't easy for anyone, and having talked to plenty of other moms about their experiences, I feel pretty lucky — no serious complications, no c-section, no back-labor, no tearing or vacuum extractions or other horror scenarios. I went into labor a little after midnight and thirty-two hours later: presto.

As a result, most hospitals now offer parents the choice of having their baby room with them or go to the nursery. And such a choice makes sense; many of the moms I know spoke glowingly about their rooming-in experiences — especially moms who had relatively short labors or sleepy babies who gave them the chance to recover from the not insignificant strains of childbirth. But other women — women who had marathon labors like mine, or difficult labors, women who bore fussy or hungry or colicky babies and then attempted to care for them through the night — found the experience torturous, or in many cases, simply impossible, and were grateful to be able to send the baby to the nursery for a night or two before going home.

Often, I find myself recalling with bitter amusement the tour guide's explanation for our hospital's policy: "We believe that new mothers actually sleep better with their babies close by."

Yes, this must be why enemy interrogators frequently use tape recordings of screaming infants as a form of low-grade torture, because the sound is just so soporific.

]]>Kim Brooks http://www.babble.com/My-Date-with-Dr-Ferber-An-excerpt-from-Afterbirth-Stories-You-Wont-Read-in-a-Parenting-Magazine/

L.A. may be the city of dreams. But, for us parents, Boston is the city of sleep. All of the greatest pediatric sleep doctors practice there. You can feel the pulse of their giant brain-veins as you drive down Longwood Ave. and Storrow Drive, past the medical Walk of Fame: Boston Children’s, Beth Israel, Mass. General, Dana-Farber.  Homes to the greatest baby doctors on earth. So great, you know them by one name, like Bono, or Angelina, or God. To us, they are superstars: Sears, Brazelton, and, of course, the great Ferber.  The man who made "cry it out" a household phrase. A man so famous that he has his own verb: Ferberize. As in, "We can’t go out tonight, we’re Ferberizing little Max."

Ferberizing is the Ironman of competitive parenting: You train your baby to sleep on his own by letting him scream his little lungs out all alone wondering where the hell you went.  It’s not for the weak or the lazy.

But if you have the stony heart to do it, it’s worth it. Because, as every overachieving parent knows, it’s all about the sleep: how soon your child does it through the night, how long, and how deeply. It’s the single biggest mark of success or failure in the first three months or parenthood. The faster you reach it, the sooner little Max can get on with tracking a raisin with his eyes and packing his bags for Harvard.

So, naturally, if you live in Boston and you want your child to have an edge, you try to get a piece of the sleep doctors. Anxious and overeducated, we’ll line up, like Oscar day gawkers, to catch a glimpse of the great ones — to hear them speak, or to rub elbows with them at your husband’s boss’s college roommate who went to med school with one of them’s cocktail party.

Some parents might even have the balls to seek an appointment. Fat chance. Someone has to actually die before a space opens up and, even then, there are parents who’ve been waiting years ahead of you. Get in line, groupie. You can’t sleep your way to the sleep doctors in this town.

You need to know all this so you can appreciate what it is I’m about to tell you. I’m not a lucky person. I don’t win preschool raffles, or baby-shower games, or Blues Clues Bingo. But one day— one frigid New England Monday— my luck changed. I got the golden ticket of competitive parenting.

My daughter hadn’t slept through the night in four and a half years. In other words, never.  For a while we were able to make excuses for her: "Oh, she needs to eat every few hours"; or, "We just moved, so she’s in a transition period"; or, "it’s Daylight Savings. Again." Every few months we’d buy another sleep book, read it, and try the latest method out on her for a week or so, but none of them ever took. Then we’d get too tired, or lose the book, and things would just keep on keeping on.

We never volunteered any of this information. But inevitably we would get asked The Question: "Is she sleeping through the night?" Now, this is a land mine of a question. It seems harmless, but what the person really wants to know is: "Are you a lazy slacker?" or, if they’re newish parents, "Are you worse at this than I am?" The few times we fell into the trap of telling people the truth, they’d start in about setting limits and consistency. Usually this would be followed by a lecture on their personal sleep guru’s philosophy and how, with the right commitment, it worked for them.

The point is, no one feels sorry for you when your kid is the "Bad Sleeper." They just look at you like you represent everything that’s wrong with the world: negligence, sloth, incompetence. Like I can’t be bothered with sleep training because I’m too busy surfing the Internet for cheap deals on recalled car seats. To make things worse, every time we turned around there’d be another study out about how sleep deprivation makes you stupid and fat. Great. Now we weren’t just lame. We were dumb, fat, and lame.

One day, determined to seize control, we locked our daughter in her room and let her scream from three-thirty to six-o’-clock in the morning. Just like the book said. When she finally stopped, our stony hearts leapt for joy. We cracked open the door, expecting to find her little body in a heap on the floor, surrendered to sleep. Instead, there she stood, staring at us with a twinkle in her eye — baby shit everywhere.  If I hadn’t been so completely freaked out, I might have admired her for her ingenuity. After all, she figured out what the biggest weapon in her toddler arsenal was, and she wasn’t afraid to use it. But as I pulled on my rubber gloves and started scrubbing the walls with every ounce of disinfectant I could find in the house, all I could hear was the snide voice of Failure whispering in my ear: It’s over. She’s broken you. You just don’t have what it takes.

We started lying to friends and relatives after that. We figured if we couldn’t wipe out Failure, we could hide it like a fifth of scotch in the flour bin.

But then our son was born, and I stopped being able to keep up whatever façade of control I’d managed to cobble together. The interrupted sleep combined with a newborn was finally just too much. I started doing things like leaving the house with my Brest Friend still on.  A Brest Friend, if you haven’t seen one, is a big foam donut that velcros around your waist so you can rest the baby on it, breast feed, and keep your hands free for things like eating and crying. It even has little pockets in it for the remote and your cell phone in case you want to watch people on TV eating and crying; or want to talk to a friend and cry, or talk to her about what you’re eating.

I don’t know if it was the hormones, or the sense of our utter failure finally hitting me that drove me to chance the unthinkable. But, one day, Brest Friend strapped to my waist, boobs flapping around like a crazed harpy, I fished out my phone and called the office of the Great Dr. Ferber himself.

There must have been something in my voice — some sound-wave frequency that vibrated in just the right way off the receptionist’s inner ear. Kind of like a dying whale sending out a distress call. Maybe someone had just that second died, and, before the receptionist had had time to pick up the phone to call the next family in line, my call had gone through. All I know is that she had an appointment for me. Six months away in July. But, still, an appointment. And not with one of his lackeys, or his protégés. With Him.

I carried that appointment around with me like a sweet secret. Every time I would have to endure the smug advice of another parent toting her sleep-glutted wunder-child, I would think: I have tried everything possible to fix this problem. If Dr. Ferber can’t fix it, then it’s unfixable.

In a weird way, I think this was the outcome I was hoping for. I imagined Ferber working intensely on our daughter, canceling all of his appointments and speaking engagements to direct all of his brilliance toward her. He would let her scream for days in a padded room that he would spray down with Lysol every few hours, but she would persevere. She would be his greatest challenge. A medical anomaly. Never in his thirty years of practice (he would say) had he seen such a child. She must be a genius. How lucky she was to have such patient and insightful parents who had the guts to make that call. But there’s nothing to be done. Nothing. (A pause: he removes his glasses, and rubs his giant brain-vein). I have exhausted all of my expertise, all of my tricks. If I can’t make this child sleep through the night, then no one possibly can.

And then he would send us home, vindicated. When people would hear about our Vampire child and ask in that patronizing tone, "Well, have you tried Ferberizing her?" we would finally have the iron-clad response: "Why, Yes. Yes, we have." Then I’d reach into my impeccably organized diaper bag and pull out the laminated article from the New England Journal of Medicine featuring my little genius. Judgment would turn to awe.

Don’t get me wrong. There was a part of me that was hoping it would work. But I liked this story a lot and kept adding onto it as the months went by. It kept me warm and safe through that frigid winter.

But then things, as they always do, started to change: Winter turned to Spring; I didn’t need my Brest Friend anymore; my baby son inexplicably, accidentally really, started sleeping through the night. Even my daughter started waking up just once instead of twice or three times. Sometimes.

In June, I got a call from Dr. Ferber’s receptionist to confirm my appointment. And you know what?  I didn’t think twice before telling her I didn’t need it anymore. When I hung up the phone, it took me a few moments to realize the hugeness of what had just happened: I had actually broken up with the man of my dreams.

My daughter’s eight now. She’s a great kid, but she still wakes up at least once a night usually and calls out for a snuggle or a blanket, or just because she can. We have, according to the books, utterly failed. But when I walked away from my Ferber fantasy, I also walked away from what those books represent: the idea that every child can and must be shaped into the same perfect being, and our need to get the gold star for doing it perfectly and by the book.

Now, instead of lying about how well my family sleeps, I tell people that I cancelled on Dr. Ferber. And I feel kind of proud about it. Because when I did it, I owned what every parent knows but few of us publicly admit: that this is a sloppy job, and no amount of Lysol can wipe out all the messy, petrifying imperfections it brings out.

Even if the real reason was that I was just too tired to go.

Excerpted from Afterbirth: Stories You Won't Read in a Parenting Magazine, edited by Dani Klein Modisett.

Dear Get Yours,

We must begin by disclosing that we are those moms you're complaining about. Maybe not as much as we used to be, but in those early days, we could quite often be seen leaving the house with Einstein hair, mis-buttoned shirts, and yoga pants worn so often they may as well have been surgically attached. Things are better now. But we still have great empathy for the new mother's grooming challenges. The way we see it is, in the early months (years?) of parenthood, all bets are off. After 75 days without REM sleep, we'd forgive a mom for walking around with no pants on, never mind lipstick. We do have a certain kind of awe for moms who manage to look flawless while caring for an infant . . . not unlike the feeling we have about people who break bizarre world records.

We weren't proud of our slovenly ways. It was just how things went down. By all means, if you've got the inclination and the motivation to keep up appearances in the midst of chaos (or if you've been lucky enough to be blessed with great genes and a baby who's not so chaotic), more power to you. But there are plenty of reasons why a mom may not be able or inclined to dab on the gloss for every soccer game.

Everyone's basic primping threshold is different. There are women who would never dream of leaving the house without using several hair appliances. There are others who might easily leave the house wearing two different shoes. And that's before having kids. Pile a newborn or a carpool and a job on top of that, and everyone tends to move down the ladder a few rungs. This may be a simple matter of priorities or it may be an actual political stance.

And speaking of priorities, when do you see these grungy moms? At daycare drop off? The park? It may be that they clean up nice when they see fit but have no interest in looking good for a bunch of toddlers in a sandbox or, for that matter, you. Life with kids is messy; they may just be dressing for the job. Some mothers actually do want to spend more time on their looks, but aren't able to. Lack of time, support and resources equals a compromised grooming system. Maybe they've rationalized looking like hell for the time being, or maybe they are as horrified by themselves as you are.

It's also possible that a mother who spends no time on her own appearance may actually be depressed. If this is the case, styling is the least of her problems. Have heart, and count your blessings.

When you're looking at other mothers, remember that they have different priorities and lives you may not fully understand. Partners, too, have different expectations. It is actually possible that these unkempt women are fine with how they look, and their partners are too. And if they're not, it's really not your concern. Sure, there is something to be said for just running that brush through your hair every morning, come hell or high water, colic or a sexless marriage. But somehow we're not worried that women aren't getting a strong enough message to "look good." There's a formidable MILF/yummy mummy culture out there doing a decent job of just that.

Our question to you is: why do you care so much?

Your husband was worried about your looks going south after you had kids. You've obviously proven him wrong. So why do you have to take down your schleppy sisters? What is it about their lack of primping that you find so threatening? Do you feel that their disheveled looks are a sign of their altruistic commitment to childcare over self-care? Does falling apart on the outside signal falling apart on the inside? Or alternately, does a controlled image mean that life is under control?

Think about what's behind the disgust, because it could well be a very legitimate fear; a loss of control, happiness or sense of self we all fear losing. Working out this anxiety can be a lot more productive than being critical of other women.

There's no reason to think the scruffy mom next to you in the sandbox is bringing you down. If anything, she's making you look better.

Have a question? Email parentaladvisory@babble.com. Questions submitted may be used for publication.

Click to buy Ceridwen and Rebecca's book!

"Nothing like that happened to me," she says, wrinkling her face. "I loved having babies."

But her June Cleaver facade can't fool me! Once again, I've been indulging in my newest guilty habit — reading parenting websites and "mom blogs" — despite being twenty-six years old, unmarried, and having no immediate plans for children. And now that I know the dark truths about pregnancy and parenthood, I've come to wonder if I might be better off raising guinea pigs than joining in this whole "cycle of life" thing.

Because I've got to say, it doesn't sound like a lot of fun.

A brief summary of what I've learned about procreation from reading magazines and websites:

First you get pregnant, after months or years of costly fertility treatments that involve needles the circumference of ballpoint pens but are necessary because you've dragged your (expensive, office-appropriate) heels past the peak fertility age of twenty-four. Once properly inseminated, you develop hyperemesis gravidarum and puke up every ounce of (caffeine-free) herbal tea you ingest until you need an IV, by which point you've lost your job and your will to live. And that's before the sudden appearance of stretch marks, which you affectionately call "tiger stripes" because it looks like an enormous cat tried to claw its way up your torso to reach that Dorito you're shoving in your mouth (Doritos, or grilled cheese sandwiches, or Chunky Monkey are the only food you can keep down; as a result you've gained eighty-nine pounds and kids on the street say, "Mommy, what is that thing?").

Then comes the birth. If it's in a hospital, it's overmedicalized and impersonal and you're pumped full of pitocin until the baby comes shooting out into the hand of a twenty-six-year-old resident who's using the other hand to text on his iPhone. If it's a homebirth, you discover while squatting in your birthing pool that contractions feel like being disemboweled with a hunting knife, but your Baba Yaga-like midwife won't let you go to the hospital for an epidural, because epidurals cause autism and malaria. In either scenario, labor lasts at least ninety-four hours.

Once the baby's here, you must spend between six months and eighteen years feeling like a terrible, horrible mother because you A) Can't/don't want to breastfeed (and formula is an UNNATURAL ARTIFICIAL CHEMICAL POISON!!!), B) Find changing diapers less fun than backpacking through Honduras and sleeping with Irish scuba instructors, or C) Occasionally consider popping your baby in the free alt-weekly box outside Whole Foods so you can get some sleep and so your baby will be raised by the next person who comes for a newspaper, who probably has organic carrots in her shopping bag and would be a much better mother than you.

To save what's left of your sanity, you write about your experiences on your new mommy blog. And oh, your blog commenters can sure relate! In fact, their stories are much worse than yours. They gained 237 pounds while pregnant and had to be taken to the birthing center on a flatbed truck. Their feet got so swollen they actually exploded, taking out the eye of their OB-GYN. They too planned a natural birth — ha! — but wound up screaming for not only an epidural but a dram of chloroform. Their baby once cried for seventy-seven hours straight, until their family was not only evicted but deported. Now they live in exile in France, where child-raising is much, much more evolved; every mother there is guaranteed by law a free nanny who'll makes boeuf bourguignon for your enfants while you get your government-sponsored pedicure.

So here are your choices: 1) Move to France, 2) Get your tubes tied, or 3) Prepare to spend the rest of your life wiping diarrhea off your forehead and listening to something called "The Wiggles" on infinite repeat . . .

You might ask why I, a childless twenty-something, need to read these mommy confessionals — what the blog Jezebel delicately terms "torn-vag tell-alls." Shouldn't I be reading Cosmopolitan and focusing on Skill #3 on the "57 Ways to Drive Him Wild" list?

Well, as someone who hopes to have kids within the next, oh, decade or so, I'm curious for the glance into my own potential future that magazines provide. And beyond that, I like the candor and biting wit of mommy lit, a kind of dark honesty about everyday life that's hard to find in mainstream non-motherhood-related publications. Even in this day and age, most women's magazines are still all about how to be, or at least appear, perfect: "11 Perfect Swimsuits to Minimize Your Trouble Spots," "701 Tips for the Perfect Summer Wedding," ad nauseum. Blechh!

I appreciate that the current tell-it-like-it-is movement is a reaction to the kind of repressive feminine ideals that have dogged women since long before magazines were even invented. Still, sometimes all this honesty freaks me out. Did I really need to know what an umbilical hernia looks like, or hear about how mastitis feels like your breast is being chewed by a vole? Frankly, the whole motherhood thing seemed a lot more appealing back when all I saw was the US Weekly version — you know, the one in which Angelina Jolie totes a cherub straight out of a Renaissance painting on her slender, Versace-clad hip before handing it off to an adoring Brad so she can jet to Cambodia to shoot Tomb Raider 17.

I could just stop reading this stuff and stick to US Weekly instead. But I won't. Yeah, it might scare me off having kids, at least for a few years. But when I do, I'll be confident that I've already heard the worst, that there will be no ugly surprises around the bend, that my experience can't possibly be as terrifying as hers, or hers, or hers. Right? Right?

Turns out the experts are on his side. The numbers are daunting — but odds are you can make it work. In this report (pdf), the USDA estimates a middle class family will spend more than $204,000 to raise a child to adulthood (not including college tuition). Considering a middle-income family makes an average of $61,000 before taxes, it's not hard to imagine few have an extra $204,000 lying around. It's no wonder a Charles Schwab/Baby Center survey in 2007 found that forty percent of women delay pregnancy because of financial concerns.

But that hasn't stopped babies from coming. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, that same year mothers aired their financial dirty laundry was the year the United States had its highest number of births — ever. In 2007, there were 4,315,000 children born. That's 15,000 more births than the peak time of the baby boom in 1957.

Were any of those parents ready? Maybe, maybe not. The good news is, you can be — even if you aren't right at this very moment. We spoke to a slew of experts and came up with these seven key steps to easing your pre-baby financial anxiety.

1. TALK HONESTLY WITH YOUR PARTNER ABOUT MONEY

Couples who traditionally keep their finances separate or don't talk much about the division of costs have more trouble having an open and honest discussion about what's to come. Now's the time to throw pre-conceived notions out the window, along with privacy concerns. "A baby changes everything about your life — sleep schedules, priorities, your social life, your financial status, and the primary couple relationship," says California psychotherapist Tina Tessina, PhD., author of Money, Sex and Kids: Stop Fighting about the Three Things That Can Ruin Your Marriage. "These changes happen overnight, because the day a baby is born, everything is different from the day before. There is no way to accurately predict how these changes will feel, and the learning curve for new parents is very steep. Planning ahead for what you can anticipate, like finances, helps make the transition easier.

2. CHECK YOUR CREDIT SCORES

Whoever takes the lead in finance for the couple can take the lead in the family finance discussions too, starting by pulling up each partner's credit report to get a good accounting of their financial situation. The report — available free yearly via AnnualCreditReport.com thanks to the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act — will show you how fit you seem to the financial world. Fiancial advisors like Suze Orman can provide you with strategies for upping your FICO score even if you don't raise your income. (These include paying bills on time, raising the ratio of credit to debt, paying off high-APR credit cards, and fixing errors on your report.)

3. ESTIMATE YOUR POST-BABY INCOME

Meanwhile, Lucy Duni, vice president of consumer education for TrueCredit.com by TransUnion, calls for every couple to draw up a budget. "Everyone has the 'nice to haves' and the 'have to haves,'" she explains. "Start with the nice-to-haves and see if you can go without." If you are considering living on one income after the baby comes, try living on one income before pregnancy to see if it's feasible. Set aside that second income in a savings account. Financial experts advise every American have at least three to six months living expenses in a separate savings account at any given time in case of job loss or other emergency, but a Bankrate survey showed fewer than four in ten do. Now's the time to make that happen, Duni says, and ideally to add an extra cushion for family emergencies.

4. RESEARCH YOUR EMPLOYERS' FAMILY LEAVE POLICIES

Now's also the time to find out what employers offer during a maternity or paternity leave — even if both parents plan to return to work after the baby is born. The Family Medical Leave Act requires parents be granted up to twelve weeks leave without risk of losing their jobs, but there is no requirement that they receive a paycheck during those twelve weeks. Some businesses provide a disability benefit, but even that is well below the average salary.

5. CHECK OUT YOUR HEALTH CARE BENEFITS

Couples need to explore the pregnancy and pediatric costs associated with their health insurance plans. Will they cover prenatal care, delivery in a hospital with a private room? Will the baby be added to the plan at birth, or will that take some time? If your employer doesn't offer an affordable family plan, now is the time to look at your local children's health insurance program to determine what out-of-pocket medical expenses might be both immediately after the birth and as children grow and require well visits to the pediatrician (as often as monthly during the earliest stages of life).

6. CALCULATE CHILDCARE COSTS IN YOUR AREA

The final piece of the puzzle is a look at the expenses that make up that $204,000 figure from the USDA — diapers, shoes, jars of baby food, extra rolls of toilet paper because your toddler is fascinated with the flushing action of the toilet. The answer? There is no one set figure for every child. "That frustrated me to no end when I was pregnant," Erica Sandberg, author of Expecting Money: The Essential Financial Plan for New and Growing Families, says with a laugh. "Two words I loathed when I was pregnant were 'it depends.' I think what parents crave is to know exactly how much it's going to cost. They need to know diapers cost, say, $75 per month." So cruise the baby section of the local supermarket and quiz other parents. Just as you'd ask an experienced mother about breastfeeding or picking out the right stroller, ask how much they spend on diapers, on bottles, on clothing.

7. HAVE FAITH IN YOURSELF

"No matter where you are, you can make changes, become financially ready," Duni says. "You shouldn't feel intimidated to sit down and take that first step — these are YOUR finances. If you are in a more challenging credit situation, give yourself six months to put yourself in a better situation. There are no quick fixes, but everyone can do it." Duni and her husband had no guarantees when they had their child, nor did Erica Sandberg and her husband when they had theirs. They all agonized, but they all made the jump. "I think fear is healthy," Sandberg says. "No, no one is every one hundred percent ready, but you can get close to it, and close to it is good enough."

Whenever I see the toys available to kids these days, I seethe with jealousy. Robotic unicorns that fly! Video games more realistic than life itself! Jet packs! Where was this stuff when we were kids? To be fair, we had some pretty decent toys during our childhood. That is, if said toys had ever actually done the things they were advertised to do. We are a generation of rubes. On Saturday mornings, advertisers showed us incredible playthings that could do stuff far beyond what technology was capable of achieving. But we bought it hook, line and sinker because . . . we were kids and we were dumb. Then we worked all summer just to earn money to buy that laser death ray which — guess what? — vaporized nothing. That was the moment we learned the world was just a tangle of lies. In memorium of our childhood innocence, here are the fifteen most egregious toy commercial claims. — Cole Gamble

The heavy bleeding sent me to the hospital in hysterics nearly two months before my due date. That's where I learned my cervix had shortened and thinned almost completely, a warning sign my body was gearing up for labor way too early.

After a steroid shot to accelerate my daughter's lung development, the obstetrician gave me pills to prevent contractions and another more bewildering prescription — bed rest. "We don't know if this really helps prevent preterm delivery," he told me. "But let's try everything we can to keep her cooking in there as long as possible."

So without further questions or second thought, I went to bed, lying on my left side to keep pressure off my uterus and prevent labor. And all at once, I went from being an independent, go-getting newspaper reporter and compulsive runner to a bedridden patient completely out of control of her body and life.

Each day I got up only to shower and brush my teeth, use the bathroom as necessary, and in an occasional fit of guilt-producing recklessness, pour myself a bowl of cereal downstairs. My husband did his best to pick up the slack around the house, and friends and family visited when they could. But even a nightstand brimful of good novels and bad romantic comedies couldn't distract me from the fear and uncertainty.

Minutes, hours, entire days passed when all I did was cry and imagine the worst. I spent the restless winter nights in the black hole of my bedroom pleading with my swollen belly as I watched it rise and fall, trying to will my defiant womb into compliance. The medication made me jittery and flushed. My bones and muscles ached from the lack of activity. Time passed imperceptibly, but somehow my maternity leave was evaporating before I could even stroke my baby's downy head or inhale her sour breath.

I have never felt more alone.

Ironically, I wasn't. Each year, an estimated 700,000 — or one in five — pregnant women in the United States are placed on bed rest for just about every obstetrical complication imaginable. It is a standard way to treat preterm labor, threatened miscarriage, preeclampsia, multiple fetuses, low or high amniotic fluid levels, pregnancy-induced hypertension, premature rupture of membranes and incompetent cervix, among other conditions.

For what purpose? None, according to Judith Maloni, Associate Professor at Case Western Reserve University's Bolton School of Nursing, who has produced most of the major research about pregnancy bed rest and received the first National Institutes of Health grant on the topic.

For more than a decade, Maloni has been calling on doctors to stop prescribing bed rest routinely to pregnant women. "The body of evidence shows that bed rest has minimal or no benefit," she says. "That might be no big deal if bed rest didn't hurt you, but it does."

Maloni's early studies took a cue from NASA and Russian aerospace scientists, who began to put people on bed rest in the early 1940s to investigate the potential consequences of weightlessness during long-term space flight.

The problems they observed in their subjects were dramatic, like muscle weakness and atrophy, indigestion, bone loss, dizziness, blood clots, fatigue and fainting. Then there were the psychological side effects such as increased stress, anxiety, sense of isolation, sleep disturbance, boredom and depression.

"We set out to systematically discover whether the same side effects of inactivity are there for pregnant women on bed rest — and they are," says Maloni.

Maloni found these side effects last well into the postpartum recovery period, just when women most need strength of body and mind to deal with the trials of new motherhood.

Alison Gary spent two months on bed rest in her suburban Maryland home last year after her blood pressure climbed to worrisome levels while she was pregnant with her daughter Emerson. Five months later, the thirty-four-year-old continues to suffer from intense hip and knee pain, as well as debilitating exhaustion that she attributes to her lack of activity before childbirth. She sprained her foot during labor, likely because of her muscle loss. "I still feel like I am healing from it all, and like I am playing catch-up for a whole period in my life that was taken from me," Gary says.

Debbie Blucher became pregnant two years ago while living in Switzerland for her husband's job. The couple planned to return home to California to deliver their baby, but then doctors diagnosed Blucher, thirty-seven, with a shortened cervix and placed her on strict bed rest for ten weeks. She spent three of those weeks alone in a Geneva hospital. "I had no Internet access and no English TV," recalls Blucher. "There was nothing to distract me from my boredom and thinking the worst."

A year after the birth of daughter Madeleine, Blucher still suffers from back pain and is trying to regain her strength. "I was always very athletic," she says. "But [after being on bed rest] I would walk two blocks, and it would take me twenty or thirty minutes shuffling down the street, out of breath."

In addition to these emotional and physical side effects, the financial cost of bed rest can be extraordinary. Consider lost earnings, hospitalization, medical bills not covered by insurance, transportation, prepared meals, household help and child care. A 1994 study — the most recent data available — put the annual price tag of bed rest in the U.S. between $266 million and $1.3 billion.

During my bed rest, I took short-term disability at my paper, using up invaluable FMLA-time and forcing my husband and me to endure an untimely blow to our bank account. Luckily we had savings to pay the bills during those lean weeks. Some women are not so fortunate. And I can't imagine having to cope with bed rest while caring for older children or as a single mother.

This toll on women, their families and the health care system would be worth paying if there were strong evidence to suggest bed rest prevents adverse pregnancy outcomes.

In theory, bed rest improves blood flow to the uterus and reduces pressure on the cervix that might stimulate dilation and contractions.

"The thought is intuitively appealing that when women are more active, they will contract more," says Dr. Hyagriv N. Simhan, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist at University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. "But that fails to recognize the root causes of premature delivery, which is often caused by bleeding or infection in the uterus. And why those things happen is poorly understood."

Randomized controlled trials — the gold standard in biomedical research — comparing pregnant women on hospital bed rest with those who remained active found there was no difference between the two groups. Bed rest did not prevent miscarriage, preterm birth or fetal/infant death, says Maloni. Furthermore, there is no research about whether bed rest works to improve infant birth weight or treat placenta previa, preterm rupture of membranes and other high-risk complications of pregnancy.

This uncertainty is reflected in the 2003 guidelines of the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, state that "bed rest...(does) not appear to improve the rate of preterm birth and should not be routinely recommended."

Likewise, "The Future of Children" report by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation reviewed the research on bed rest in twin pregnancies and concluded "that in the absence of proof of the effectiveness of bed rest, its use should be curtailed sharply."

Yet Maloni's research shows about ninety percent of American obstetricians still prescribe bed rest in some form, continuing to believe in its value despite mounting evidence to the contrary. "Doctors aren't trying to do the wrong thing, but it takes a long time to change conventional wisdom," says Dr. Simhan.

Maloni believes change might only come if insurance companies stop paying for bed rest-related medical expenses — or if women empower themselves to ask their doctors the right questions about the efficacy of bed rest and its side effects. At the very least, she says, pregnant women placed on bed rest should get a second opinion from a perinatologist (an expert specializing in high-risk pregnancies) and ask their doctor for a comprehensive physical assessment and rehabilitation program after childbirth.

"I've never told a woman not to go on bed rest — that's an individual question that people have to answer with the help of their physicians," Maloni says. "Instead, I just keep calling on the professions of nursing and medicine to incorporate scientific evidence into their practice and change the model of care."

For as long as doctors keep prescribing bed rest, pregnant women like myself — terrified and vulnerable — will listen.

Author and English literature professor Sarah Bilston was placed on bed rest during her first pregnancy for low amniotic fluid, an experience that inspired her bestselling novel Bed Rest, and its sequel, Sleepless Nights, to be published this August. When doctors prescribed Bilston bed rest again during her second pregnancy, she briefly considered not complying, but couldn't go through with it.

"I knew all the studies from my research for the book," Bilston says. "But when your child's life is on the line, what woman is going to do anything other than what she is told to do by her doctor? If they had asked me to stand on my head for six months, I probably would have done that, too."

Blucher agrees — and now has a positive outlook about her time spent on bed rest. "When you are lying there day after day in a fight with your emotions, bed rest can be the hardest thing," she says. "But I just look at Maddy — she's an amazing, healthy kid — and it puts everything into perspective."

After spending four weeks on bed rest, my obstetrician was no longer worried about my baby's birth weight and allowed me to walk again and even return to work. A week later, Ilyssa was born full-term and healthy, weighing 5 pounds, 11 ounces.

I suppose I will never truly know if I helped avert a real threat to my baby's life. And of course I'd do it again if that's what the doctor orders the next time around. But should most women ever have to? Probably not. Let's hope one day medicine agrees.

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It was 8:45 PM on a Saturday night and the babysitter was not here. I had to be onstage, telling jokes at a New York City comedy club, at 9:15. I'd already left her a voicemail in my high school Spanish.

"Hola, uh, es la mama de William. Donde?"

I would be late for my spot if I didn't leave immediately. I wrapped my one-year-old son in a blanket and ran for the car. The babysitter and I communicated via Babelfish.com. I would write an email in English and convert it to Spanish. She would do the same, in reverse. I thought we were good for sabado. Damn. Merde?

I had four fifteen-minute sets that night, at three different comedy clubs. My final set ended at about one a.m. In theory, William and I could hang out in the car between spots, but while I was onstage, I'd have to hand him to somebody. I pulled up to the club at 9:12. Five or six comedians were standing out front. Some I knew, some I didn't.

"Hey!" I shouted, flipping on the hazard lights. "Can anyone sit with the baby? I'll pay you twenty-five bucks and I'll be back in twenty minutes." A comic named Maggie slid into the back seat.

"Thanks," I said, handing her the diaper bag. "Now, try not to kidnap him."

"You're no fun," she said. Maggie rode with us for the rest of the night, pocketing about a hundred dollars, which was not much less than me.

This wasn't supposed to be my life. I wasn't going to have kids. When I got pregnant by accident, I was forty and single. But also bored. I took a "Hey, why not?" approach to motherhood. My belly became a prop that I took on the road. We had a good time, the fetus and me. Indiana, Texas, Montreal. We flew to Alaska in my fourth month and L.A. in my eighth. My last show as a non-mom was the night before I delivered. When the baby came, I lost fifteen minutes of material.

And my lifestyle.

Comedians have the best lives. I used to stay up until four a.m. and sleep until whenever. Now, most mornings I wake up like the amnesiac from Memento. I have no idea where I am, or whose child is crying. Next to my bed is a helpful Polaroid of my son, captioned with the words: "You are his mother and his diaper needs to be changed."

William's dad is also a comedian. We took the baby on the road when he was six months old. My boyfriend would do his set, then run back to the green room, where I was waiting to pass him the swaddled baton. The emcee would kill a few minutes onstage until I arrived. It worked because there were two of us.

Now the baby is older, and there's often just one of us.

The boyfriend and I usually work alternate road weeks, but recently we each booked separate gigs during the same week. Neither of us could afford to cancel. We figured it would cost less for me to take William to Michigan than for my boyfriend to take him to North Dakota. I found a sitter online. She came to the hotel at seven p.m. I debriefed her on her mission as I saw it, which was to keep my son awake for as long as possible so I could sleep in the next morning.

"He's gonna start yawning in an hour. Don't buy into it. If you cave and put him to bed, he's gonna wake up at six a.m. And that can't happen because I will be dead by Sunday. I need you to keep him talking until eleven or so."

"Like, sleep deprivation? For a two-year-old?"

From the tone of her voice, I could tell she was not completely on board.

"Of course not! That's a torture technique. Jeez. All I'm saying is, when his eyes start rolling back into his head, point out the window and yell, 'plane!' That's it. Now, if he happens to spend the next thirty minutes looking for a plane that isn't there, well, that's his choice, isn't it?"

"Uh huh."

"Five or six times over the course of the evening should do the trick. And you don't have to say 'plane' each time. 'Firetruck' works. If you really want to keep him hopping, try 'Daddy.'"

I returned to the hotel at 1 a.m. I'd done two fifty-minute shows. I was tired.

"What time did he go to bed?" I asked.

"A little before eight."

Being home is hard, in a different way. After William was born, I cut back on the road work and took a day job writing for a now-defunct website. We had health insurance and the basic bills were paid. But I was in a frustrating position as a comic.

Sunday-Thursday spots in New York City don't pay much, or at all. But they are the best shows to try out new material. There is no pressure to kill. And new jokes get fine-tuned for the weekend shows, which do pay. That system worked great before I had a kid. Now, I had to hire a sitter for those nights. And all of a sudden I was out $10-$50 dollars every time I did a set. I went from eight to fifteen development sets a week to about two.

My growth slowed, despite the fact that I had so much more to talk about. The problem was solved for me in January, when the day job ended. Now I'm back on the road, doing long sets where I have plenty of opportunity to sneak in new stuff. The corporate benefits are gone, but so is the stagnation.

And the boyfriend and I have settled into a groove. When we're both in NYC, we perform on alternate weeknights, or one of us will do an early set, and race home so the other can make a late set. We spring for a sitter on weekends and the occasional miercoles o domingo. My schedule's not the same as it was during the non-mom days, but is anything?

The Pregnancy Bible: Your Complete Guide to Pregnancy and Early Parenthood follows every step of pregnancy from conception to labor to postpartum recovery (and even early newborn care). The book, edited by OB-GYNs Joanne Stone, MD and Keith Eddleman, MD, is full of helpful guides, lists and illustrations. This excerpt, "Ways Your Partner Can Help You Through Labor," helps labor partners prepare for their role in the delivery room.

Keep in mind that the needs of women in labor differ, so tune into what your partner wants. Here are some things you can do that may help her cope better with the process.

According to studies, women in labor have five basic needs: physical care and comfort; pain relief; the constant presence of a supportive person; unconditional acceptance and reassurance; and knowledge of what is happening. The support that a birth partner can offer has numerous positive effects. It has been shown to: decrease the need for medication and intervention; shorten labor; decrease the risk of cesarean birth; and improve outcomes for newborns.

Stay close by. Be aware that some women in labor like to be touched and others don’t. Physical touch can communicate caring and concern and prevent her feeling isolated.

Consider her position. Urge her to change position frequently, as this can help ease backache. Use pillows, rolled blankets, or towels to maximize relaxation. If she’s able to get up and walk, encourage and assist her. Some mothers use “birthing balls,” large air-filled ball on which they bounce to relieve the pain of a contraction.

Keep her clean and dry. Labor may cause a woman to move her bowels or urinate, and at some point her water will break. Help clean her quickly.

Relieve her dry mouth. Use of breathing techniques can dry out her mouth, making it feel uncomfortable, so help her drink liquids, or suck on ice chips, if permitted. Use lip balm to lubricate and moisten her lips. Also, help her brush her teeth.

Keep her cool. Apply a cool washcloth to her face, throat, or other body parts. Spray her face gently with water. Alternatively, make a fan from a washcloth, a piece of paper, or gown.

Apply a warm or cold compress. Contractions may cause back pain or cramps. Help her out by applying a warm washcloth to her back.

Massage her lower back. Ask her to lie on her side so you can give her a back rub, using lotion. This may be particularly helpful if she’s having back labor (when the pain of contractions is felt mainly in the back). However, be aware that she might prefer you to stop the massage during a contraction.

Encourage her to pass urine. A full bladder may slow down labor, so remind her to go to the bathroom often—she should try at least every hour.

Use relaxation techniques. Ideally, practice these before labor begins. One easy technique involves asking her to tighten then relax each muscle in turn, starting with her upper body and progressing slowly down to her toes.

Help with breathing techniques. Learn whatever breathing exercise she wishes to use in advance, and help her focus on it during contractions. It may help if you ask her to take a deep breath and sigh after each contraction to help “exhale tension.”

Promote rest. Keep her surroundings as peaceful as possible, and encourage her to rest to prevent exhaustion.

Assure her privacy. Respect her need — or lack of need — for clothing and draping during labor.

Offer emotional support. Whisper words of encouragement. Praise her for her tremendous effort. Tell her, "you’re doing great!" Compliment her. Use words of endearment, and, if appropriate, express your love for her. As labor progresses, tell her it’s nearly over.

HOW TO STAY FOCUSED ON HER NEEDS

Each woman is unique, responds individually, and has different needs in labor, so it’s important to ask her if a particular measure is helpful or desirable. Be prepared to change tactic or give her a bit of space, if that’s what she wants. Keep in mind these key points:

Consider your purpose. What are you trying to do with your support and comfort measures? Make sure that you focus on what she wants.

Be involved. Your constant presence and attention to how she is feeling and the procedures that are being carried out are necessary to enable you to provide meaningful support.

Be prepared. Pack necessary items several weeks before the due date, and plan your route to the hospital in advance.

Keep up your energy levels. To provide effective support you need to stay energized yourself. Be sure to get something to eat and drink during labor. It’s best to take food and beverages with you. Also, take a break, if possible. Relax in a chair in the labor room or take a short walk on the unit. But don’t leave the unit — you could miss the birth.

Excerpted from The Pregnancy Bible: Your Complete Guide to Pregnancy and Early Parenthood, edited by Joanne Stone, MD and Keith Eddleman, MD. (Firefly Books; 2nd Edition September 30, 2008.)

Dear Large,

Sounds like you have some nice options on either end, which is great news. It doesn't necessarily make your choice any easier, but at least it takes the pressure off. What you need to think about is what the next year of your life is going to look like, and how you'll be able to get what you need wherever you are. Of course, there's a lot you can't plan for in the unpredictable world of birth and new parenthood. But there are some things most parents would agree are incredibly helpful during this time: you need to feel cared for, plugged into resources, connected to the world, and minimally stressed by anything other than caring for the baby. Here's a closer look at these needs; ideally, you'll want:

— A Caregiver You Feel Good About. You are right that the Northwest tends to be on the more progressive side when it comes to birth. If that's what you're after, you'll probably find it. But it's not always easy to get your choice caregiver at the very end of pregnancy — this totally depends on the caregiver and local resources, but to be on the safe side: Research your West Coast care options now. Call midwives, doulas, birthing facilities or birth educators in the area and ask what your options would be. Also, are you happy with your New York City provider? It's not necessary to move west for progressive care; there are midwives and doulas in the city. They may not give you that all-encompassing NoCal vibe, but they could meet your needs.

— A Strong Support System. After the birth, it's important to have people around who can really help. A new mother is doing a ton of work and she needs to be mothered. Serious lack of support has been linked with postpartum depression. You may feel more secure and connected in New York where you have friends, colleagues and neighbors . . . or in California with your husband's family. How is your relationship with your in-laws? Getting support requires accepting it. And it can be hard to show real vulnerability with people you may otherwise be seeking to impress or keep at a polite distance. When you imagine your in-laws sweeping in with rotisserie chickens and swaddling blankets, do you feel comfortable? Ditto with the NYC posse. Will they take care of you, or will you be taking care not to offend them?

— A Reasonably Comfortable Physical Environment. Those sunny coastal walks you mentioned could do wonders for a cooped up new mom. Which may or may not compensate for returning home to a mountain of unpacked boxes, an unfurnished living space, or a place you moved into under time pressure but never really liked. Do you feel confident that you could find a new place you'll feel good about by birth time? How do you feel about the space you're in now? If it's cramped and you're already "out of here," you may feel frustrated or as if you're living in transit. New mothers tend to spend a lot of time on the couch feeding their babies. Think about what you'll be looking at. And whether you like that view.

— Connection. Moving to a new place often involves a period of isolation. Sometimes this is really welcomed: the feeling of being fresh and new and out there in a curious place is exciting. But sometimes it can be very lonely. New mothers can feel isolated even in a very familiar place. Isolation is also associated with depression no matter when in your life it happens. Being around other new mothers can be so important to help give you perspective, an outlet for ranting and raving, and a network for sharing advice on baby care. So think about where you have connections to other mothers and friends: this may be the west coast, this may be NYC.

— A Manageable Amount of Stress. You need to think about the reality of the actual move. At five and half months, you basically have three months to pack, move and settle. That's not a huge amount of time. If you have a house waiting for you, a make-it-happen husband and the resources to pay for movers who will all but pack and unfold your underwear, you'll be cruising. If you are planning a U-Haul, DIY move, you need to think seriously about the fact that you may need help tying your shoes by the time you get there. We've seen women move continents at seven months. But not everyone is up for Extreme Nesting. It may seem better to get the stress over with now. But if you find that you're desperate to get it done because you fear that once you have a baby you won't be able to move from one room to the other, let alone coast-to-coast, we want to reassure you. Newborns are quite portable, and often spend a lot of their time asleep. You won't be messing with a baby's schedule or attachment to a space; new babies are generally erratic and can hardly see past the tip of their parents' noses. So try to remain calm about that possibility.

We want to end on a positive note. Moving is challenging, so is becoming a parent. But both are pretty exciting, too. Like so many decisions to come, this one will be best made by sitting down and talking out the pros and cons with your partner. Look at what each scenario involves in a realistic way. Consult your gut. (Women in pregnancy can be very smart about what they need and when they need it.) Then make a decision together and move on.

Have a question? Email parentaladvisory@babble.com

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1. Play in the mud. Mud can be made anywhere — in the yard, in a small pool, or in a bucket on the porch. Just combine dirt and water, and most children will know what to do from there. For extra fun, add utensils, pans, bowls and buckets (thrift stores usually have super-cheap ones). If your child is hesitant, dig in yourself and show him that it can be fun to commune with mud. The point is to get dirty with reckless abandon. Another fun mud project:  Place your child's muddy handprints on construction paper to create a unique keepsake. Turn the handprints into inspirational "mud art" by writing this line from an e.e. cummings' poem at the top of the handprints: "The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful."

2. Build a fairy house. Find an out-of-the-way place to build a fairy house, such as at the base of a tree, in a corner of the yard, or even in a planter. Then search for natural materials that can become tiny chairs, tables and beds for elusive "woodland fairies." Let your child's imagination run wild as she searches for sticks, pine cones, leaves, seed pods, acorns, shells and rocks that can be turned into a fairy's household items. When your child asks if fairies are real, just ask her what she thinks about it. For ideas and inspiration, read Tracy Kane's wonderful children's book Fairy Houses.

3. Grow a garden. Michelle Obama is growing a White House Kitchen Garden this summer with her daughters. Try this yourself at home, either in a small plot in the yard or in planters. You can grow plants from seed in the early spring or purchase plants in late spring. Tomatoes, lettuces, herbs and sunflowers are good plants to start. You'll learn in your first year and can expand upon your knowledge the next year. Keep a garden notebook to record your successes and challenges, as well as pictures of your farmers and crop.

4. Visit a nature center. A nature center is often a community's best-kept secret. These outdoor education centers typically offer helpful programs about local plants and animals, and nature center naturalists are great resources for information about interesting activities in your area. Look in the phone book or online for your closest nature center and plan to spend a morning or afternoon exploring what's there.

5. Make a tree your friend. Have your child pick a favorite tree in your yard or neighborhood to make his own. Put a ribbon around it or something simple that declares it "his" tree. Name the tree and watch how it changes throughout the year. Have your child draw and photograph the tree to create a special tree book. Find out what kind of tree it is, and watch throughout the year to see what animals live in it and what kind of seeds it produces. This is a simple way to develop a child's connection with nature.

6. Find a secret hideaway.  Help your child to find her own secret hideaway in the yard, woods or at a park — under a tree, behind or on top of a rock, or in a special nook at the park. This can be a hidden place for your child to read a book, play and imagine. This can even become a spiritual place of sorts, such as a prayer rock or quiet spot under a tree for quieting the mind.

7. Go berry picking. There is nothing like picking your own strawberries, blackberries, raspberries and blueberries on a warm, sunny day. Look for local farms with pick-your-own opportunities. Or look for wild areas with berries ripe for the picking — for free. Be sure all berry pickers are wearing hats and shoes (not flip-flops). If you have space in your yard — it doesn't take much — plant and grow your own berry bushes; it usually takes a couple years to establish bushes, but it is well worth the effort. Look online for the best-tasting crops so you aren't disappointed when your plants bear fruit.

8. Rock hop in a creek. Childhood isn't complete without a creek to hop around in once in a while. Creeks are great for wading, water fights, crawdad-hunting, rock-hopping and exploring. Find a favorite spot and allow your child time to play and explore. Be sure that any creeks children enter have acceptable water-quality ratings; check water quality through local municipalities and utilities.

9. Learn about songbirds. Place a bird feeder near a window or in the yard and watch who comes to visit. Purchase a bird guide, such as The Young Birder's Guide to Birds of Eastern North America (a Peterson Field Guide), to help identify the birds at your feeder. If your family gets good at identifying birds, try participating in the annual Great Backyard Bird Count through the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and the National Audubon Society. Check online for local birdwatching groups; these groups often host educational outings that are interesting for children and adults.

10. Start a nature journal. Buy a blank notebook and some colored pencils and, voila, you have a nature notebook. Pack the journal in a backpack for walks, hikes and canoe trips, and encourage your child to draw what she sees: trees, leaves, birds, pine cones, rocks — even you. Be sure to set aside 15 to 30 minutes to sit, draw and talk with your child about what she is drawing. Don't critique drawings; simply let her draw and enjoy the experience.

11. Feed the squirrels. Gather acorns or other nuts in a basket and put them out for the squirrels. Watch to see if you have any takers. If you set up a squirrel feeder (dried corn-on-the-cob will work), create a fun maze for the squirrels using ropes, water guards or other deterrents — squirrels are smart and you'll enjoy watching them navigate the maze.

12. Play outside. American children spend an average of 30 minutes of unstructured time outdoors each week, according to recent studies. Give your child the gift of unstructured play time to discover, create and imagine while outside in nature.

13. Paint rocks.  This may seem simple, but rock painting is a great way to excite children about exploring outdoors. The most important part is the rock hunt, which can be done in the woods, the park or the backyard. Have your child search for "special" rocks. Then sit outside — armed with paintbrushes and non-toxic paints — to create rock art. Painted rocks are artful additions to potted plants, gardens and windowsills. If you live near or plan to visit the beach this summer, you can do this with shells too. The salt on the shells makes watercolors bright and beautiful, and it's a great way to escape the sun for a while.

14. Visit a state park. Look online for state parks in your area and plan a weekend getaway. Many state parks offer camping or cabin rentals, as well as outdoor fun, such as fishing, hiking, canoeing and swimming. To get the inside scoop on activities and events, call the park and speak to a ranger — most are happy to share their recommendations.

15. Enjoy a campfire. Campfires represent everything wonderful about being outside — camping, friends and family, hot dogs and s'mores. Check with your local fire department about campfire regulations. If you can have a safe campfire in your backyard, invite the neighbors over to enjoy it with you. If not, plan a weekend getaway at a park or campground that allows for campfires.

16. Build a fort. Forts, tree houses and playhouses can be rustic or extravagant. There are many books today that offer wonderful and practical ideas for creating childhood getaways. Or use your imagination — and your child's — to create your own.

17. Follow the phases of the moon. The moon affects nature and all living things, but it is so easy to overlook its changing beauty. Take a month to watch the moon phases. Each night at the same time, step outside and look up. Have your child draw each night's moon phase. Or just look and listen to night sounds. Find some moon-themed children's books at the library or bookstore that you can read together during your moon-study month. There are many websites that can provide additional age-appropriate information about the moon

18. Pack up some books and read outside. Find a special place outdoors to read — under a tree, in a hammock, on a porch or at the park. Pack your backpack with books and snacks and head out to read with your child. This takes away all the distractions of home, such as phones, all things electronic, and the constant need to clean. If you need some new books, look for nature themes at the library or bookstore. Learn more about the importance of reading aloud to your child, as well as age-appropriate books, at Read Aloud Magic.

19. Explore in a canoe. Canoeing is a fun way to explore local waterways, as well as to quietly observe the plants and animals that live around water. If you have never canoed and are starting from scratch, call a local nature center, aquarium or outdoor recreation retail store for information about canoe outfitters in your area. There are also canoe and kayak clubs in many areas that offer skill training and outings.

20. Take a hike. Hiking is great exercise and a fun way to spend family time. Look online or ask around for local trails. Fill a backpack with snacks and water, and you're off for an easy outdoor adventure.

21. Start a nature basket. Find an old basket, or something made of a natural material, that can be your family's nature basket — a place to keep anything beautiful that is found outdoors. This is a great place to keep rocks, sticks, shells, fossils, pine cones or anything else deemed beautiful by your family while exploring the outdoors. Be sure not to disturb anything growing or take anything that should remain outdoors (such as bird nests). Keep the nature basket in an accessible place for your child to empty and look through whenever he feels the urge. Find a special place in the woods or near water for returning items back to nature when you are through with them or when you need more space for new items in the basket.

22. Inspire the imagination. If you ever thought you had "discovered" something ancient in nature as a child, you probably still remember it to this day. Children come alive when they believe they have discovered something, whether it's a hidden treasure in the bottom of a creek or a flint rock that could have belonged to an American Indian. Help your child think like an archaeologist, anthropologist or historian by opening your mind to what you could be looking at in nature. Even the mere suggestion that a rock could be a dinosaur bone, that a crevice could be a footprint, or that a stone could be an ancient animal bone can stir a child's imagination and joy in exploration.

23. Host a water day.  Invite friends over for water fun in the yard or a park. A small pool isn't necessary, but if you have space, use it. Make bubble buckets with water and soap. Play with water balloons. Bring ice cubes outdoors to watch them melt. Put out a sprinkler. Water toys can include bottles, sponges, spoons, cups and pitchers. This is a great activity for hot days in July and August.

24. Play in the rain. Turn off the parent voice in your head that says "Get out of the rain!" and let your child stomp in puddles and get muddy and soaking wet. Rain boots and an umbrella are optional.

25. Take a family camp vacation. Put away the Mickey Mouse ears and take the whole family to camp for vacation this year. Many summer camps offer weekend or week-long sessions for families to enjoy all aspects of camp together — activities, meals, cabins, campfires and roughing it. Call the traditional summer camps in your area to see if they offer family camp sessions or look online for family camps around the country.

I distinctly remember the first time I saw a woman's boob in a baby's mouth. I was twelve. The woman was my aunt. The baby was my cousin. And the boob, pendular, big-nippled and bulging with milk, seemed like an alien appendage, closer to a turtle's shell or a camel's hump than the budding cleavage I stuffed into my training bra each morning.

One could hardly call this a watershed event, and yet I remembered it the evening my husband and I attended our first post-natal get-together, a babies-welcome gathering of our closest friends, most of whom had an infant and/or toddler of their own.

When it came time to feed, rather than excusing myself to the living room and sitting through forty minutes of boring silence like a child in a time-out, I found myself surprisingly un-squeamish about the idea of taking care of business right there amidst the homemade gnocchi and adult conversation. At first I attempted to cover up with a blanket I'd brought for the occasion, but I was never very good at this. I'm not sure if it was my lack of coordination or the baby's claustrophobia or both, but it quickly began to look and feel like a WWE Wrestling match was taking place inside my shirt.

"What's going on in there?" a friend asked in her most non-judgmental voice.

I threw the shroud on the floor. I turned a little to the side. I got comfortable, dug into my gnocchi, joined into the conversation. There were six of us at the table — three couples — people I'd known for years, but as the baby nursed contentedly in the sling, the conversation grew stilted, as though the Pope or a customs inspector or someone's persnickety grandmother had entered the room. I thought of my aunt's camel hump boob. Beside me, I could feel my husband blushing. In between sides, I decided to retire to the living room after all, forgoing a precious half-hour of the adult company I so badly craved.

In case you were wondering, I do not live in a cloistered, religious compound or Puritan enclave. Many of my friends are artists, writers, editors and students. These are people who champion gay marriage rights and teach Sabbath's Theatre to eighteen-year-old undergraduates from Kansas. And yet a single breast, my breast — humble, leaky creature that it was — had the power to derail them. It occurred to me that culturally, something strange was taking place here.

If nursing openly at a casual dinner party could create such social awkwardness, what, I wondered, would happen if nursing mothers all across the country began unlatching their brassieres at gas stations and ATMs, on subways and at podiums? What would have happened if a certain former vice-presidential candidate whose name shall not be uttered were to have nursed on the stump? Would the fabric of civilized discourse unravel? Was there something so inherently erotic about the female breast that even in open-minded, mixed-company circles it needed to be hidden?

My first inkling that something might be amiss came a few months back when a friend of mine, an industrial designer, visited Guiana for a few weeks as part of an NGO program to teach local artisans how to prepare their goods for export. Many of his students were nursing mothers and most of the classes were taught in small villages. When I asked him what the greatest element of culture shock had been, he blushed, looked down, and his girlfriend ended up answering for him: "Tits. William has never seen so many tits in his life."

Now, just to put this in perspective, my friend is a pretty sophisticated urbanite. He has an MFA from Parsons. He is a self-proclaimed metrosexual. He has posed nude for his girlfriend, a photographer. He loves babies and is looking forward to having a few. He is not the kind of guy you would peg as having many hang-ups about lactation. And yet both he and his girlfriend, an equally enlightened individual, through much nervous laughter, told us how awkward it was to be face to face, teaching these women about the color wheel while between them a baby suckled at a breast.

Pondering their discomfort and remembering my own pre-motherhood, I decided to ask an expert on the anthropology of breastfeeding if nursing women around the world — for example, in Cote D'Ivoire, where Alma Gottlieb, an anthropologist at the University of Illinois, conducted extensive field work — felt the need to conceal their breasts or seclude themselves while nursing. I'd spent eighty bucks on a Hooter Hider I never used and endured more than a few hours trying to balance my infant in a public toilet stall, a grungy department store "ladies' lounge" or simply sequestered off in a corner, alone, as though I were engaged in some unsightly act of personal hygiene. Do women in Cote D'Ivoire do such things?

Gottlieb is a soft-spoken woman with a lovely laugh that rang out like a bell at this question: "That would be absurd," she explained. "The idea alone would elicit peals of laughter." In the villages of West Africa where she lived, "The rights of the breast belong to the baby. It is simply not an erotic part of the body."

I began to re-imagine how my nursing experience might have been different if, above and beyond feeling comfortable nursing at a dinner party, I'd been able to walk around topless all summer, or whip out my "un-eroticized" breast in the teacher's lounge of my college, or nurse in the middle of a restaurant without blanket, without cloak, without feeling like I was embarrassing, at least a little, the friends or family at my table. How ridiculous it all began to seem — so much fuss over a glandular organ as functional as any other, an organ that, after all, has a far more primal purpose than filling out a strapless dress or selling Budweiser. I imagined the women of West African villages looking at the enlightened mama cloaked in a Hooter Hider or nursing in the bathroom with that same mix of sympathy and bewilderment and condescension I catch myself using on a Muslim woman trudging through the summer heat in a black burqa. Oh, I thought, how myriad and wondrous are the ways different cultures come up with to make things inconvenient for their fairer sex.

"One last question," I said to Alma Gottlieb at the conclusion of our interview. "Did seeing what you saw in Africa embolden you when you returned to the States and became a nursing mother yourself?"

"It did," she said without hesitation. "If I hadn't lived in Africa, I'm sure I wouldn't have breastfed in public. But I knew a way of doing this that made a lot more sense. And in another part of the world, I knew people were not uptight about it. The feminist in me said women have a right to breastfeed and babies have a right to be breastfed and because we lead busy lives, we have to do it in public."

"So you breastfed everywhere?" I asked.

"Almost. I never breastfed while teaching a class or in a faculty meeting. In another life I might, but in this one, I wasn't quite that bold."

That is not a very original comparison, and I've no doubt that most men with a workshop and a rudimentary knowledge of comic books have at some time thought the same thing. It's also not an accurate analogy. If anything, my son has more in common with Superman than I do. For one, he has a Superman costume, which I do not. More importantly, he and Superman both have stepfathers, and in this scenario, I am Pa Kent, the genteel farmer who, along with his wife Martha, adopts the infant from Krypton.

I have retreated to the basement because my stepson, Gavyn, is upstairs concluding the first visit that he has had with his biological father in two years. Gavyn is nearly seven; I've been with his mother since Gavyn was three, and I left him and his father alone to say their goodbyes because it seemed like the polite thing to do. Also, I did not wish to hear him call his biological father "dad."

Prior to his father's visit, I'd never brought the matter up with him regarding how I should be addressed, although it would be disingenuous to suggest that it didn't bother me a little that he called me "Kevin." I don't even have a fatherly sounding name, like Fred or Burt. I have a name that belongs to a kid idling along the sidelines at a kickball game.

Of course, it wasn't always like this. There was a time when I delighted in being called by my first name by Gavyn. That was when I was resisting becoming a father. I never had any desire for children, nor did I ever desire to be married. Neither of these responsibilities figured into my life plan, which up until the age of thirty-two had been to do as much as possible while working as little as possible. An achievable dream for a single man with seven cats, but one day I realized I was saying things to my cats like, "Who's a sexy kitty? Mitzy's a sexy kitty, isn't she? Yes you are, yes you are." I like to think I have a good handle on when I'm approaching the edge, and I quickly assessed that I needed a girlfriend to take the edge off.

Prior to meeting Patrice, I had only dated one other woman who'd had a child. That girlfriend had been very resistant to bringing me around her daughter. She made it clear she wasn't looking for a husband or a father for her child. I met her daughter on only two occasions, and those times occurred simply because a babysitter had not been available. In many ways, I believe that relationship fizzled out because I was always kept at a certain emotional distance. If a woman was wary of having me around her child, what did that say about me?

Patrice was not at all hesitant to have me hang out with Gavyn. In retrospect, I wonder if she wasn't a bit too eager to bring him around. After all, while my apartment seemed perfectly fine to me, it should have raised a series of red flags for any rational person in charge of the well-being of a child. I have mentioned the seven cats. I should also point out the two-foot-tall bong, walls decorated with posters (which would be somewhat fine if framed, but I was past thirty and still using thumbtacks and tape), the erotic refrigerator poetry, the legions of empty beer bottles in my recycling bin, and the loaded firearm in my kitchen cabinet. I do not know why these things did not deter Patrice. She is a former Miss Teen South Carolina. She has retained her youthful good looks. She was not desperate. It remains a bit of a mystery.

Naturally, before she ever brought Gavyn to meet me, I tidied up my apartment to make it suitable for a child to visit. And also, I will admit it: I played the kid angle. I went to my folks' house and got some of my old toys and brought them down to my apartment. I went out of my way to have Gavyn like me, and also to convey to his mother that in spite of my bohemian trappings, I was a responsible adult at my core.

Plus, the more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea of possibly being involved for the long haul with someone who had a child. It seemed a better fit for me than fathering a child of my own. I feared passing on the plague of anxiety and depression that has haunted me my whole life and which afflicts nearly all of my relatives. As I saw it, being a stepfather was very much like Obi Wan Kenobi mentoring Luke Skywalker and teaching him the ways of the Force. After all, Gavyn had a dad already — that guy could handle the father business. I would be Gavyn's cool, older buddy.

And perhaps that arrangement would have worked had Patrice and I simply dated and lived separate lives otherwise. But within two months of appearing in my world, Patrice and Gavyn settled into my apartment, Gavyn's dad moved twelve hours away, and I was suddenly thrust into a very strange position: the role of the Father Figure. I'd spent my entire life trying to master the part of the Disappointing Son (and I'd been doing a splendid job in that role, if I may say so myself). After a few more months of living together, Patrice let it be known that I needed to get serious or move along. And for reasons that are not entirely clear to me, I got serious.

I literally made the decision to marry Patrice in about five minutes, got a ring that same afternoon, and proposed that night. Two things stand out about my proposal in retrospect: I am apparently quite impatient; also, I found I really couldn't let Gavyn down.

I was and I still remain in love with his mother, but I've been as deep in love with other women as I was with Patrice and I never married them. The difference was that, while my relationship with Patrice was growing, there was a second relationship taking root that was undetected by my emotional defenses. Gavyn's father had all but abandoned him, returning to his own pre-marriage utopia of surfing and fishing. He let the occasional phone call drift in so that he didn't become a total stranger, but otherwise he was out of the picture.

I wanted to take care of Gavyn and his mother. It seemed like the right thing to do.

Which is all quite laughable now. Not only was my thinking terribly chauvinistic, I believe I have already detailed the many variables in my life that made me incompatible with stability. However, Patrice's income was plenty to provide for her and Gavyn, and I made enough to keep a roof over our heads, so we were in good shape. Except that Patrice was quite forgetful about taking the pill, especially after a few glasses of wine, and within a month of our nuptials she was pregnant with twin girls. So much for playing on the edge of fatherhood; I was being pushed in the deep end.

To my credit, I have managed to swim more often than I've sunk, but the twins are two now and they are accumulating more words every day, and the word they are constantly saying to me is, of course, "Daddy." It melts my cynicism entirely when they say it. Who knew that one word could have such power?

But when my family is gathered around the dinner table, it feels as though the four people with whom I live are divided into two camps: those who know me as Daddy, and those who call me Kevin. I worry that Gavyn will feel our relationship is somehow lesser because he and the girls use different nomenclature for me, a sign that defines the levels of intimacy between us.

However, I don't believe in forcing a child to refer to anyone by a specific name unless it's a matter of manners. That seems quite a bit different than my situation. I don't want to issue a dictum that I should be called "Dad" if I haven't earned the title.

And that is what it feels like: I am not doing a good enough job, because if I were, Gavyn would call me Dad.

When Patrice comes into the workshop to tell me that Gavyn's biological father has gone, I am separating the wood screws from the machine screws. I love to separate screws because I find organization calming, but Patrice seemed to think my ongoing campaign of proper screw separation was a sign of something else:

"Are you okay?"

"Why wouldn't I be okay?"

"Because of Gavyn's visit with Frank." It's true — Gavyn's biological father has a fatherly name. But I shall spare the reader the twenty minutes of hemming and hawing about what is bothering me before Patrice elicits a confession:

"Look," I say. "I took Gavyn to school his very first day. I'm the one reading to him at night. I'm the guy who showed him how to tell the difference between deer droppings and raccoon droppings. Why does Frank get to be 'Dad'? I want to be 'Dad'. It sounds petty, but I love Gavyn to death, and I'm trying, and it seems like I get nothing."

"What are you talking about? Gavyn always calls you Dad. Have you been drinking?"

"What are you talking about? He calls me Kevin."

"When he's talking to me he refers to you as Dad. That's what he calls you when he talks to other people too. You didn't know that?"

I walk past my wife without saying anything, climb the stairs, and find Gavyn sitting in the kitchen working his way through a roll of Smarties.

"Gavyn," I say, "when you talk to other people about me, what do you call me?"

He looks at me and crunches the candy in his mouth, as though he can't quite make sense of my question, then he says matter-of-factly, "Dad."

"But why do you call me Kevin?"

He tries to suppress a smile. "Because I wanted you to notice."

I stare at him for a few seconds and then say, "Are you messing with my head?"

His smile is suddenly uncontainable. "Yep. And I won."

There is no doubt in my mind that — DNA aside — this is my son.

For years I hid my desire to have a baby, even from myself. I always felt that bringing a child anywhere near my family, which I typically describe as "dysfunctional at best" would be completely unfair. The men in my family all have secret lives of some sort and the women are all denial-ridden enablers. (How many empty crack vials do you need to find before you realize he's got a problem?)

Since most of my relationships had basically been reruns of my Mom and Dad's, my Aunt and Uncle's, my Grandmother and Grandfather's, I figured, quite logically, that I'd turn out much the same. Even in high school I was attracted to the perfect-on-the-outside boy (class president) who ended up being a sinister creep. This guy not only stalked me after I broke up with him, he cornered me in an empty classroom and literally threw a room full of chairs at me.

Understandably, I didn't want to bring a kid into this depressing life picture and figured it was forever out of the question.

But something weird happened in my late twenties. I met a wonderful, sweet man who was as awesome inside as he seemed outside, and I fell totally in love with him. And after four years together I started to fantasize (often!) about building my dreamhouse.

For someone who'd had long-term relationships end in tear-filled admissions like "I had sex with my sister Linda the whole time you were in Maryland" or the lovely "I can't hide it any longer: I've been prostituting myself to buy meth for the past six months," the level of positivity and forethought necessary for dreamhouse planning was a remarkable leap for me. "Dream" implied a future that was fantastic rather than nightmarish. "House" implied actual stability! In my world, that was just crazy talk.

Regardless, I started carrying around a book called Building Your Own Dreamhouse. Chapters like "How to Pour a Foundation" and "How to Chose a Contractor" welcomed me into the world of people who believed that life could be good. I actually began to imagine the idea of a love not fraught with lies or denial or underground tension. If I just found the right piece of stable land, I could build that: a safe place where the bad stuff didn't keep happening to me.

Planning my dreamhouse as a place for both my boyfriend and me was too much for me at first. I started hyperventilating the first time we went to buy curtains together. I guess the thought that I could believe in something as ultimately doomed as I assumed our relationship was overwhelmed me.

So I took it slow with my dreamhouse. At first it was just for me.

After ripping pages out of magazines and filling several notebooks with sketches, I came up with my design. The lower floor would be a kitchen, bath and living room and the top floor would be my bedroom suite. There would be a spiral staircase leading to it and a hatch at the top like on a submarine that I could close at night. I would also have fire safety ladders hidden in the window seats, so if I ever needed to escape in a hurry I could. It took me about a year to imagine my boyfriend at my dreamhouse, but eventually I did. I even added an imaginary office for him.

Shortly after that I began picturing kids hanging around outside. At first they were just neighborhood kids riding bikes that I would wave to from my dreamhouse garden. But one day I saw myself on my hands and knees digging, and there was a little girl next to me. We were making holes and I was showing her how to put the plants into them.

It is now ten years later. My boyfriend has become my husband. He held my hand as we picked out curtains and doorknobs and even chairs for the beautiful home we moved into together. And while it took some time for me to warm up to the idea of setting up house together, once I did, I became as obsessed with it as I had once been with my dreamhouse.

But instead of using ideas from magazines to design our place, I ended up using the few happy memories of domesticity I did have. I'd always loved my best friend's house. Her mom decorated it in the '60s and then just left it the same for twenty years. By the '80s, the once-bright colors had all faded to sun-washed pastels that spoke more of a busy happiness than neglect. That's what I decided to do too: decorate once and then marvel as things aged.

I also stole some ideas from the set of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. Its simplicity always made me feel calm and seemed to reinforce all the nice things he had to say to me. (I have a feeling I am not the only person who cried harder when Fred Rogers died than when certain members of my family did). And of course, I planted a garden, just like the one my mom and I used to work in together.

Our house is a beautiful, safe place full of happiness and possibilities rather than the fear and dread I felt as a kid. Sure, my husband and I fight sometimes and sometimes I get depressed despite the pastels everywhere, but it really has become the home I always wanted. More importantly, after fourteen years I am finally convinced that I am not going to come home to find my husband shooting up with an underage hooker in our kitchen.

And that's how I, at age forty, found myself in the waiting room of a fertility clinic. The dreamhouse is built; the only thing missing now is the girl in the garden.

"I?m only giving him a taste," she explained, cheeks flushed. "I almost never give him sugar."

Across the table, the mom of the birthday boy was feeding him the slimmest sliver of carrot cake.

"It is his birthday," she apologized. "This is practically his first sugar. We haven?t even given him meat yet."

Standing in the kitchen doorway where I was letting Leo demolish an entire adult-sized piece of cake, I ? as per usual when then conversation turns to baby diets ? kept my mouth shut.

Because if I opened it, I?d have to admit that the first food Leo ever tasted was ice cream, straight from the plastic spoon at Molly Moon?s ice cream parlor after a trip to the zoo. Then I?d have to admit that on his first birthday he didn?t get some paper-thin slice but a full-sized piece of banana cake with plenty of frosting, and he downed every last crumb. That not only has he eaten meat of pretty much every persuasion, he?s also delved into pizza, fish sticks, and enough homemade cookies and cake to win me the June Cleaver award.

As someone who?s tired of getting the fish-eye from people who seem to think feeding your child a donut is the equivalent to feeding him crack. I?m just going to come clean and say it.

I got my first inkling this wasn?t going to work out when I took Leo to a party when he was about 3 months old.? I watched a father try to steer his two kids away from the chocolate chip cookies and towards a plate of shrimp. Could I pull a lie like that over on my son? That shrimp is a viable choice over a chocolate chip cookie? Surely my kid is going to be smarter than that.

Then there was the friend who told me she never fed her three kids sugar, but that she and her husband pulled the ice cream tub from the freezer every night the second they went to bed. And another friend whose mother raised them on applesauce-sweetened date bars and told them they were cookies. And the mom I met at the park who proudly informed me that she?d baked her daughter a tofu-carob birthday cake for her second birthday and swore up and down this was celebrating. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that building a junk food-free life for Leo would involve a lot of lying? ? and that?s one dynamic I don?t want unfolding between us.

I can?t say I get any support in the popular press with this one. Every time I turn around there?s another parenting magazine or newspaper headline warning me my child?s going to be an obese and angry underachiever if I offer him any snacks besides apple slices and baby carrots.

]]>Nan Mooney http://www.babble.com/My-Baby-the-Chubster-I-was-scolded-for-calling-my-infant-daughter-fat-Whats-the-big-deal/I was recently harshly reprimanded by a relative for calling my young toddler Chubby, Chubs McGinty and Chubby Chubs and, okay, once Greedy Guts (she eats all the time!). Apparently this relative was traumatized by being called fat names when she was younger. But my daughter doesn't even talk! And babies and toddlers are supposed to be fat! And eat all the time. It's cute! Am I wrong? — Mrs. McGinty

Dear Mrs. McGinty,

Sure, babies are "supposed to be" plump and squishy. In fact, many parents worry considerably if their baby isn't round with big cheeks and chubby little toes. We've all heard the expression "a big, healthy baby." Acknowledging the bigness and chubbiness of a baby could be seen as an affirmation of vitality. If you were in sub-Saharan Africa, you'd be accused of bragging.

But in our culture, we have complicated feelings about being "chubby." Especially when it comes to girls. You might say your relative has a chip on her shoulder, but it's a pretty common chip in a world where fat is a liability. We can imagine why a mother calling her daughter chubby might send a shiver. And if Chubby's loaded, Greedy Guts is downright hardcore. Now you're bringing in appetite as an undesirable trait. (Guts doesn't have particularly nice connotations, either.)

Many parents — even if they try their hardest not to — project a future appearance based on early impressions. People predict baldness, double chins, acne, ass shape, torso length, and upper body strength all from the shape of their squirmy, gummy infant. In this context, you can imagine how Chubby might be perceived as a projection of future fatness, rather than a term of baby endearment. Nicknames can also sometimes endure inadvertently, turning nasty later. The names behind your relative's aforementioned shoulder chip may have emerged from similarly benign beginnings.

You may really mean this all in playful adoration of your daughter's abundance. But it's worth taking this opportunity to think about whether there might be something else going on. Are you afraid she will be fat? Do you have anxiety about your own weight? Most women do. We live in a very thin-obsessed and incredibly unhealthy culture when it comes to body image. It's understandable that you'd want to protect your daughter from potential angst. Perhaps using those names somehow makes you feel like you're fighting back against all that pressure. If that's the case, we applaud your intention, but as she grows, you might consider something less easily misinterpreted. It's true that she's young now, but she's learning every day. Why not start early with more positive messages?

Have a question? Email parentaladvisory@babble.com

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Since then, Lisa has gone on to host her own talk show, work the red carpet as a TV Guide Network correspondent, and of course, wow audiences on Dancing With the Stars. Somewhere in there, she's found time to create a line of dance-themed exercise DVDs (Lisa Rinna Dance Body Beautiful) and operate the boutique Belle Gray (with husband Harry). But both Harry and Lisa would readily agree that their best collaborations have resulted in the birth of their two daughters, Delilah Belle (born in 1998) and Amelia Gray (born in 2001).

Lisa spoke with Babble about her new book, Rinnavation: Getting Your Best Life Ever, revealing her best-kept secrets about everything from parenting and postpartum depression to how cosmetic surgery improved her life. — Mary Ann Cooper

With the kind of busy life you lead, why put the time and energy into writing a book? What's the inspiration for it and the meaning of the title?

Well, the book really came about after Dancing With the Stars, and I felt like if I could experience that and get through that, I could do anything. So, the idea of a book came along and I thought, 'oh great!' At first, the publisher wanted to do a diet and fitness book because of my body transformation after the show. But as I started writing the book I was bored with that. I had so much more to say than just about diet and fitness so it morphed into renovation and renaissance and renovating your life, and then of course we threw Rinna in the title and it came out that way. It's really about reinventing and renovating your life inside and out.

So let's go back to the beginning. You write that your mother survived being attacked and left for dead by a serial killer and your dad had to deal with the loss of his 21-year-old daughter (from a previous marriage) from a drug and alcohol overdose.

Everything you experience becomes part of the product of what you end up being. That's why I thought it was really important to include parts of their story in the book, because those are the two people who raised me. And I guarantee you that my strength and my drive must come from them. I became a natural survivor because of what they went though. And I learned to persevere.

So are you like your mother or your father when it comes to parenting techniques and skills?

I don't think I'm like either one of them. Although I do catch myself saying things my mom or my dad has said. But I do think I am my own parent. I am sort of like a sponge when it comes to parenting advice. I try to keep my eyes wide open because I think you can take from everyone. There's no book that tells you how to be a parent. So I am always looking for what looks right to me and what feels right for me. I like to improvise. My girls think I am the kookiest mother because I don't look or act like most moms.

As you describe in your book, your parenting techniques are by trial and error. One of your success stories is the "Caught Red-Handed" exercise. What's that about?

We went through a period when Delilah was lying a lot. I guess a lot of kids go through it, but she was lying — flat out lying and we went to the school conference and the teachers were concerned. She would say things that weren't true so that everyone would like her. We just didn't know how to get around it. One day it came up. Somebody said something that I knew for sure wasn't true and I said, "you know what? When I say something that slips out of my mouth and it's not right I put my hands in the air and say, 'Caught red-handed!'" It worked like a charm. Because what it did was free everybody because all you had to do was put your arms up in the air and say, "Oops, caught red- handed. I lied." I guarantee that was what changed it. Delilah no longer lies. I'm a person who is into admitting when I fail. I do this with my husband if I hurt his feelings; I'm really good at calling him and saying, "I'm sorry I shouldn't have said that."

Let's talk about the girls. Do they take after you or Harry?

Both are very different. The older one, Delilah, is more like me. She's silly and goofy and quite a character. And Amelia is much more like Harry. She's more serious and strong — strong-willed, stubborn. We love to be together and Sunday is always family day. We make one day where it's just us, altogether. But both are really filled with light. They're happy and fearless for sure, and from what I understand (from speaking to their teachers in school) they have a very strong work ethic. I love hearing that. The teachers say they're driven and even if things are difficult they don't give up. They're very strong in that way, which I think is great.

It has to be tough to keep from spoiling them. After all, they get to see and do a lot of things their peers can't — just because you and Harry are celebrities. How do you keep them grounded?

I'm hyper sensitive about it. You just have to be diligent about it. I don't shower them with everything they want. Yes, we do get to go to a Jonas Brothers concert or the screening of a movie and they're aware of that. They certainly know that that is not the norm and they are so so very blessed and lucky that we get to do those things. I'm like a broken record telling them that, but that's really all you can do. On the other hand, they've been around fame all their lives. Harry and I are lucky — our fans are really lovely and generous. And when people do come up to us the girls are very empathetic with them. Let's say I didn't want to be bothered and I would start to say, "Guys, I am with the kids, I'll do it another time," my girls would say, "No, no, no, mom, sign the autograph, take the picture. Do it!" They have empathy and they make sure that I sign every autograph and take every picture, which I think is lovely. I don't know where that came from. I don't know what I'm doing right. I knock on wood every day because they really are great kids.

You must have enrolled your girls in special mother and daughter classes, right? So what did you learn from that experience?

Your kids will be fine whether they take those special classes or not. That's what I've learned. I get something out of everything I go through. There are plenty of things that don't work that teach us more than the things that do work. I'm constantly a work in progress as a mom and I'm constantly learning. You have to go through it, though, and you need to come to a point where you say none of this matters. The one thing I know is that there is no such thing as the perfect mother. So stop feeling guilty.

Many people will be surprised to learn you suffered from severe postpartum depression after you had Delilah and controlled a second bout of depression with medication after you had Amelia. Why write about that in your book?

I felt like if I was going to write a book I wanted to help people and I just wanted to be honest about why I am who I am and how I got here. And so that's a big part of it. That was a huge thing that happened to me. It rocked my world; it turned me inside out. At the time I had horrible visions of knives, guns and death. I was afraid I might kill my family or myself. Having gone through this, I thought if I shared this and it helped somebody and it somehow gave them comfort or "relatability" then it would be worth it. At the time it was happening, I kept it under wraps because I thought I'd wake up the next day and it would be all gone. Then 15 months go by and you wake up and say, "Oh my gosh, it's been 15 months!" Harry was supportive, but he was also very concerned and really didn't know what I was going through because I didn't share as much with him as I should have. Now I know it's completely chemical. It's all hormonal and it's okay to ask for help. I had medication after my second daughter and it made a huge positive difference for me. I went through it before Brooke Shields and so when her story broke I burst into tears. She was so brave and when her story came out I thought, "Oh my gosh, I m not crazy!"

With two little girls there's always something you need to do for them — help with homework or a school project, drive them to games or dance lessons. How do you keep romance alive?

It's quality, not quantity, I can tell you that. It takes effort. Harry and I know that if we need to take that time, we do. And we do whatever we need to do to create that spark. We've been married seventeen years and let's face it; it doesn't just turn on as quickly all the time as it once did. But when you're tired and you're working, you have to make an effort and you have to do something to ignite the spark. You've got to be creative.

One of the ways you lit the flame was to have breast implants. Did that really make a difference for you?

Breast implants were the icing on the cake for me. I had already been to a "sex education party" and taken an "S Factor" strip class, which really got me back in touch with my own sexuality and my body. Yet, having had two babies, I didn't feel like a woman because of my breasts. I didn't feel sexy. To me, the breasts have so much to do with our femininity. Some may disagree, but for me it is a connection to my sexuality. So it was the cherry on top of the sundae. Harry didn't think I needed to do it. But it was more about how I felt about myself. Because truly if I don't feel good about myself, it's going to impede my having sex or even being happy and feeling good about myself out in the world. Little things like that can affect you. And I knew within myself that this was something that was going to help me and I was right.

If a woman can't afford implants, what else can they do to recharge their sex lives?

Women can take time for themselves. They can put themselves first. It doesn't take any money; it takes a mindset. They can take care of themselves. They can mother themselves. They can nanny themselves. I think that most women put everyone else first. I got a really beautiful message from a friend of mine yesterday who said she really didn't take any time for herself. She said, "I need to do that because that will reinvent my life. I'm a single mom — I doing this, I'm doing that. I have had three really horrific years and I haven't done anything for myself in five years. And I'm now going to do that and I know my life is going to change dramatically." If my book inspired her to do that, what a blessing!

These days, the reading ability that wowed my parents' friends is no big whoop. All children are expected to begin reading in kindergarten, having been prepared in advance by prenatal read-alouds, the healthful ingesting of board books in infancy, and flashcard drills in preschool. At today's dinner parties (usually burritos wolfed down on the sidelines of a soccer game), I hear parents dropping the names of children's books as if they were designer labels. "Junie B. Jones?" one might say witheringly. "My daughter loved that in preschool, but now she's reading the sixth Harry Potter."

In the children's section of bookstores and libraries, I've watched parents prying picture books out of their school-aged children's hands with a look of pained embarrassment. "You're too old for this," they say loudly, just in case anyone nearby might think their child suffers from some sort of developmental delay. "You know you don't like reading these kind of books anymore."

As a children's book writer who has yet to outgrow the habit of reading picture books for pleasure, I find all of this a bit disturbing. Of course it's wonderful that children are reading, and wonderful when they read complicated books. But in the fuss about literacy and reading levels and school achievement, something fundamental gets lost: the pleasure of the book for its own sake. Books that are delightful for ten-year-olds are not necessarily delightful for six-year-olds, and too often both parents and teachers encourage children to read books that are too old for them, or discourage them from reading books we have deemed "too young," thus guaranteeing that reading will always feel like a chore.

"It's not an exam, where you pass your E.B. White level and you get to go to your Tolkien level," observes Anita Silvey, author of Everything I Need to Know I Learned From a Children's Book. "The same child that reads Charlotte's Web may also read Captain Underpants. They may like Charlotte's Web and Captain Underpants kind of equally."

Recently I came home with a copy of Wolves, a picture book by the incomparably wry and inventive Emily Gravett. I had checked it out of the library for my own amusement, but it caught the eye of my nine-year-old son, Milo, who was lying on the couch reading the 528-page fantasy novel Eragon. "Can we read it?" he asked. I sat down on the couch, and we leafed through the book, giggling at the story of a rabbit who checks out a library book about wolves and ends up eaten by one. When we finished, he noticed the age range on the fly leaf: 4-8.

"Ageist!" he sputtered indignantly.

"Some people think that kids your age don't like picture books," I said cautiously. I had hoped he wouldn't find this out.

Milo was outraged. "What? But picture books are awesome."

A good answer, given that my most recent picture book was dedicated to him. I probed a little deeper, just in case he was only telling me what I wanted to hear. "What exactly makes them awesome?" I asked. He gave me an exasperated look. "They have pictures," he said.

Duh. We tend to think that illustrations are just there to keep the attention of a kid who can't follow the story without them, forgetting that we like pictures just as much as children do.

"I say to parents, 'Have you ever heard of coffee table books?'" remarks Valerie Lewis, who owns Hicklebee's, a children's bookstore in San Jose, California. "When they have picture books on their coffee table, they think it's very interesting and arty. But when Billy finally learns to read, his parents reward him by taking away his pictures."

Milo proudly identifies himself as a bookworm, a description that seems particularly apt when I find him burrowed into the sofa, his long body cocooned in his favorite blanket and his face obscured by the covers of a book. Seeing him there reminds me of myself at the same age, and I'm eager to acquaint him with all the books I loved when I was nine — A Wrinkle in Time, The Book of Three, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. But I'm cautious too, knowing that reading a book at the wrong time can be worse than not reading it at all. In first grade, with Harry Potter mania raging through his school, I knuckled under and read Milo Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, despite feeling he was too young to really appreciate it. I was wrong: he loved it. But the series quickly gets darker and more complex. Mid-way through the third book, Milo — now in second grade and reading it on his own — tossed it aside. "It's boring," he told me.

For a seven-year-old, "boring" has a vast portfolio of possible meanings, but in the case of Milo and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, I was pretty sure it meant "too soon." The jokes, the innuendos, the relationships and rivalries — it was all over his head. Looking at the discarded volume, its pages spread like the wings of a felled bird, I remembered reading The Princess Bride when I was eleven. I'd seen it at a supermarket, and thought I was buying a fantasy in the vein of The Prydain Chronicles and the Narnia books. Three-quarters of the way through, I pitched it across the room, nauseated and infuriated by the torture and death of Westley, the hero. (Westley is revived later on, but I never got that far). Golding's lampooning of fairytale conventions is hilarious for adults. But as a child, it just hurt my feelings.

Picture book writer Erica Perl (Ninety-three in My Family, Chicken Butt) is also the mother of a bookish nine-year-old, and she told me she too worries about serving books before their time. Her daughter loved Judy Blume's Fudge books, but when she finished them, Perl decided against revealing that there were other Blume books to choose from. "I think she can wait a year," she told me. "When I think of a book like Blubber, which deals with cruelty and social meanness — I'm not quite ready for her to see that."

In second grade, Perl's daughter was in a book club that had Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson as one of its suggested titles. Perl — and other parents who know the book — quickly steered the group to other choices. Not to spoil it for you, but two-thirds of the way through the book, the protagonist's best friend — a fifth-grade girl — dies in a freak accident.

"I think there's something to be said for not taking the power away from that," Perl remarked. "You kind of dilute it if you read it too soon. Either it has a huge impact and makes you afraid of an accident taking someone close to you, or — if a kid doesn't quite get it on an emotional level — then you've read it and it hasn't affected you at all. A book like that, if you read it at the right age, it has power, but you also gain the power to deal with it."

But if you're not already steeped in the world of children's books, how do you avoid being blindsided by a book like Terabithia — or by far less literary reads like the snarky, materialistic Clique books? The best resource I've found is Common Sense Media, which flags all the things that I weigh when I'm thinking about the right age for my son to read a book — not just sex and violence, but also consumerism, emotional intensity, and overall message. Reviewers suggest appropriate ages for books (nine in the case of Terabithia; twelve for the Clique books), and alternative options on the same topic. "Even great books, kids can start too early," explains Carrie R. Wheadon, senior book editor for the site.

I don't always love Milo's choice of books, but for me, the best antidote to bad books is good books. Milo is free to read pretty much anything he chooses on his own, but his dad and I also read him books that we choose. On road trips we listen to books on CD, and bedtime is still the time of day when we snuggle up with a shared book. Those read-alouds are a chance to introduce books Milo might not read otherwise, particularly classics whose old-fashioned language makes them more challenging on the page or books that take a while to get going. The books that we read together are a wellspring of family in-jokes and shared references and as the frenetic pressure of homework, sports, and activities devours an ever-increasing portion of the day, that cozy half hour with Treasure Island or Alice in Wonderland feels like one of the last protected enclaves of childhood.

Not long ago, a friend of mine told me — in the boastful tone parents inevitably fall into when talking about their kids' reading habits — that her twelve-year-old daughter doesn't read children's books anymore. "She's only interested in adult books," she said proudly. My heart sank, partly because of all the wonderful books her daughter is missing out on, and partly because I know that Milo will leave the world of children's literature eventually as well. I hope that when he does, it won't be to impress adults or improve his test scores, but will simply be because the books he loves as a child lead him, like stones across a river, to books he loves as an adult. Children's books will be there for him as long as he wants them, changing as he changes, and eventually becoming so precious that when the time comes to share them with his own child, he'll wait for the perfect moment to pass them on.

Everyone's talking about the murder of George Tiller, the Kansas doctor assassinated because of his work providing late-term abortions to women (and, it must be said, girls). Much of the talk, on television anyway, centers on political questions: Will the Tiller murder reignite abortion as an issue at this delicate moment, just as a new justice is being considered for the Supreme Court? Will conservative pundits bear some responsibility for their characterization of the doctor as "Tiller the killer"? Does criticizing those who demonized him amount to a call for censorship?

The questions I would ask are different: Will someone else take over Tiller's practice? How many places are left that will offer the service he did, terminating pregnancy in the second and even third trimesters? Who will take care of these mothers when they find themselves facing the worst choice ever?

Choice isn't just a euphemism for abortion, and it's not a political term of art either. The women who went to Dr. Tiller weren't seeking to abort pregnancies they hadn't chosen in the first place; they went to him because of wanted pregnancies that had gone terribly wrong, because they and their wished-for children got stuck with the worst luck ever — because they found themselves in situations they never, ever would have chosen. I know because I could have been one of them.

I hadn't expected to be pregnant again. Our son was only eighteen months old, and at forty I wasn't sure I was all that fertile. But my period was late and as I remembered our kid-free weekend getaway a few weeks earlier, I immediately used the last in an old boxful of pregnancy tests, left over from our days of trying to conceive our son. When it came up positive I was shocked, then thrilled — then worried, since it was an oldish test, possibly expired. My husband was out of town so I dragged the toddler off to the drugstore to buy some newer tests — these, too, showed the pale blue crosses. I called my husband's cellphone. Out with friends, he shared the news right away; they all drank to our great good fortune.

Because we'd had a miscarriage before conceiving the toddler, and because of my age, I got an early ultrasound at eight weeks. I took the pictures — the baby looked like a child's drawing of a teddy bear, circles etched in white, floating in a dark sack — when I traveled to my hometown for my father's retirement party. After I returned, around eleven weeks pregnant, we heard the baby's galloping heartbeat via the Doppler listening device.

"Nice strong heartbeat," the doctor said. "You can relax now." I started to take her advice. I thought, having had a miscarriage before our son, that I had already been through the worst my reproductive life had to offer, and was now getting to the good stuff. I was wrong.

A week later we had another ultrasound, this one to look at the baby's nuchal fold measurement, an early sign, sometimes, of heightened risk for Down syndrome. Ultrasound rooms are dark and cool and quiet places. While the technician guided her wand on my tummy and looked at her monitor, my husband and I looked the other way, into a monitor set up just for us. The baby bubbled into view, yielding some obvious features — skull, spine — while others looked mysterious and hard to read, etchings in a language I don't know. The easy thing to remember is that dark is fluid and white is tissue. At twelve weeks, the baby is just around two inches long.

The room got quieter as soon as the technician pushed and angled her wand to see the baby's neck and spine. What should have been a tiny line of darkness looked like a deflated balloon stretching from the baby's neck down its back to its rump. I simultaneously noticed that it looked wrong and immediately deleted the thought from my mind, asking instead about the profile, the legs, the hands. My husband asked if we could have a picture. The technician said sure, but didn't save or print one. She removed the wand from my belly, wiped up the sticky blue jelly, and told us the doctor would be in soon.

As soon as she left the room, I began to cry.

A doctor we hadn't yet met entered, measured in silence for what seemed like years, then crossed his arms and sighed. He told us that instead of the two millimeters they expect to see, our baby's nuchal translucency measured 76 millimeters, off their charts. He suspected Trisomy 18, a chromosomal disorder that kills most affected children before birth, and the remainder a few days or weeks after. The rare child who survives more than a few months with Trisomy 18 will be profoundly mentally retarded and painfully physically disabled. Virtually none survive more than a year or two. We immediately scheduled another test to confirm the diagnosis, but the doctor pointed out that even if this baby didn't have a chromosomal disorder — a vanishingly small possibility — it almost certainly had other major physical problems.

"We can't do anything for these kids," the doctor said, "but the best we can do is tell you early." What he said violated the carefully drawn terms of the abortion debate — to call the fetus a kid even as you make plans for termination — but he was right on both counts.

Nobody can prepare you for how quickly things change. That morning I had been thinking about beds. Specifically, I was strategizing the family sleeping arrangements like a particularly complex word problem in math class: If we moved the toddler into a big boy bed sometime just before the new baby came, then we would not have to buy or borrow a new crib. But how to time it? Move too soon, and we might destroy our toddler's good sleep habits, do it too late and we'd risk intense sibling rivalry as he saw a new baby move into his beloved crib. Would we move the two into a shared bedroom, and when? I looked forward to converting our current guest room into a nursery for two, and re-inventing the toddler's room as a smaller guest room.

A few hours later I was planning for a procedure you don't have at my age unless there's something terribly, terribly wrong. We agreed we would almost certainly terminate the pregnancy, we would say goodbye to this very much wanted, very much loved child.

Over the next day I learned a lot of things I'd never known before. How when you cry very hard while lying on your side you can actually feel the tear make its way from one eye across the bridge of your nose into the other eye, pushing a new tear out of that one. How much hope you can pack into two inches. How 76 millimeters — it's tiny, such a small measurement — can blow your heart open.

When I told friends what had happened, they cried with me. One sent me a link to a website where women wrote of similar bad ultrasounds and horrible options. While some of these women chose to carry to term, gestating and delivering babies born to die, or born already dead, most didn't. The pain they faced was nearly matched by the logistical obstacles in their way. Most of them only learned of their babies' serious problems at a second-trimester ultrasound, far too late to terminate in most places — not by law, but because the doctors and facilities simply do not exist. This is why there's a section of the website devoted to "Kansas Stories."

Because I grew up in Kansas, yet had never heard of Dr. Tiller, I clicked out of curiosity (even wondering, for a second, if chromosomal abnormalities could be more common in Kansas). Story after story described anguished journeys to Wichita, rushing through throngs of protestors only to emerge in a place of kindness and succor.

Reading their stories, I realized I was almost lucky; I live in a state where insurers cover the nuchal fold test, I was old enough that it was recommended. If my situation had been different, I might have found out about this baby's condition when they did, at the 20-week ultrasound — after feeling the baby move, after weeks in maternity clothes, in the midst of shopping for cribs and bibs.

I didn't have to go to Kansas. A week later, after cornfirming the diagnosis, I terminated this pregnancy at the hospital where my son was born. For the actual procedure, I was completely sedated. It was the first good sleep I'd had since that hushed ultrasound room.

Friends, who mean well, sometimes refer to what happened as a miscarriage. I know they're trying to spare me the label "abortion." I know they're trying to be kind; they're trying to absolve me of the implications of choice. But as much as I appreciate and depend on their kindness, I disagree with them. First, because I've had a miscarriage before, and this was different. When you miscarry your body is taking you on a ride your heart and mind rebel against; when you terminate a wanted pregnancy, it's your mind against both heart and body. You do what you have to do — what the doctors caring for you tell you is right and what you know is best for you and for the baby — but your uterus keeps growing, the placenta keeps pumping your blood and nutrients into that tiny body, and there's no way your heart can ever be ready to say goodbye.

And second, because this was a choice. When you have children, literally from the moment you realize you're pregnant till the day they go off to college, your days are filled with choices — about birth plans, breastfeeding, diaper types, potty training, preschool curricula, sports and activities, clothing and Internet use, dating and driving, and on and on. But when your pregnancy takes the kind of turn mine did, all your mothering boils down to one choice — and I chose to spare my child the suffering of a brief, painful life. Of all the million and one things I wished I could be doing for this child, the only act of love circumstances allowed me to perform was this one. The women who went to Dr. Tiller made the same choice, under even more excruciating circumstances. Now that he's gone, who will help women like them?

There is perhaps no greater affront to the system than the loss of a good night's sleep in the hazing ritual that is Freshman Parenting.  It's not for nothing that sleep deprivation is recognized the world over as an "enhanced interrogation tactic" of the highest order. And why didn't anybody tell you that "sleeping like a baby" meant being rudely awakened every two hours?

From how to scare off monsters under the bed to getting your own monsters to stay in theirs, from feng-shui to Ferber, here are 50+ tools for helping little ones learn their ZZZs. — Allison Pennell

How to Handle Bedtime Escape Artists

A recent study in the Journal of Pediatric Psychology found that a free pass may be just the ticket to a sound sleep.  When kids strongly opposed to bedtime (you know the ones) were put to bed with the free pass, parents reported a substantial decline in flight risk and much less crying out. Follow-up studies after three months showed sustained gains.

Sleep: By the Numbers

Infants (3-11 months)
What They Need: 14-15 hours
What They're Getting: 12.7 hours

Toddlers (1-2 years)
What They Need:  12-14 hours
What They're Getting: 11.7 hours

Preschoolers (3-5 years)
What They Need: 11-13 hours
What They're Getting: 10.4 hours

School-Aged Kids (1-5th grades)
What They Need: 10-11 hours
What They're Getting: 9.5 hours

The Case for Early Bedtimes

We know, it's hard to stick to early bedtimes, but the consensus of current research shows that they're key to better sleep and happier kids.Research by the National Sleep Foundation found that 69% of today's kids aren't sleeping enough. Just an hour less sleep a night has been shown to put the ability to concentrate on par with children two grades younger. Beyond meltdowns, less sleep is linked to attention problems, dulled memory, hyperactivity, and obesity.

Arrange Your Kid's Bedroom for Maximum Relaxing

DO:

DON'T:

Keep the room dark for sleeping. The body makes melatonin at night in the dark. Light makes the body think it’s daytime.

Let a child sleep with the TV on or keep a nightlight on all night. Use one with a timer if a little bedtime light is necessary.

Use ambient sound or white noise machines if street or household noise is a problem.

Have aquariums or other moving water features in the bedroom. They might sound soothing, but they can make it hard to sleep.

Display happy family photos, accomplishments, and favorite picture’s at kids’ eye level.

Hang any negative images like sharks, tigers, monsters, war toys, evil rulers of the universe, etc.

Keep clutter to a minimum.

Let your kids have access to all their toys at once.

Source: Robyn Bentley, Feng Shui Diva.

How to Scare off Monsters

Armed with a flashlight and some magic monster repellant (eg.  a spray bottle filled with water you can use for a little bedtime exorcism), you'll have those monsters out from under the bed in no time.

How to End Musical Beds

When she gets out of bed, calmly, peacefully and lovingly put her back to bed. EVERY TIME. Kiss her, hug her, rub her back. Even sit or lie next to her until she falls back to sleep if necessary. Don't talk much, and don't turn on any lights. Do choose a key phrase to repeat to her a few times, such as, "It's night-night time now. Mommy loves you. Please stay in your bed and have sweet dreams."

Source: Elizabeth Pantley, author of The No-Cry Sleep Solution

How to Help Him Fall Asleep (And Stay Asleep)

• Serve up a (mostly-banana) banana split for an early evening snack. The high content of potassium, magnesium and serotonin found in bananas promotes relaxation. Other good bedtime snacks: calming carbs. Try a bagel melt with cheese or some peanut butter and honey on toast.

• Teach the art of belly-breathing. At bedtime, have your kids lay down on their backs with eyes closed and tell them to take slow, deep breaths, with their belly pushing out on each intake. You can rub your hands together to heat them and place them on their bellies, a couple of inches above the belly button and then replace your hands with theirs. A couple of minutes should do the trick.

• Calgon, take my child away. A nightly bath helps set the mood.

• Try an eye pillow. It is a novelty for kids and it keeps their eyes closed long enough to fall asleep.

• Exchange back massages and head rubs. Just don’t fall asleep while getting yours.

How to Evict a Kid from the Family Bed

Pimp that room. A little redecorating will go a long way to transitioning a kid to his own room. Think: his own hand-picked cool new bed or bedding, a sign for the door, some new wall art, a special transitional object like a little silk blanket or stuffed animal.

Bedtime Rituals. Start with a week of jammies and books in his room, not yours, but let him keep sleeping with you. Next, have him set up a sleeping spot next to your bed week two (as opposed to in it).

Make your move. Set a date for the big move of one week later. Mark your calendar. Talk it up. And make sure that along with the heave-ho, you give him lots of kisses, lengthy cuddles at light's out and return as needed for reassurance. During this transition period, welcome your kid back into your bed if he comes calling in the middle of the night.

Source: Jodi Mindell, author of Sleeping Through the Night

5 Short Stress-Breaks for Sleep Deprived Parents.

Rub Down. For an endorphin shot, try these pressure points: Ears. Gently tugging and rubbing your ears will relax you and clear out your sinuses. Shoulders. Deep kneading with your fingertips releases tension from tissues and gets the oxygen flowing.

Mix It Up. Studies say a change of tunes can mean a change of moods. Type in an artist or song you like at Pandora.com and listen to a free custom playlist.

Treat Yourself. Re-charge with snacks high in stress-busting antioxidants like a handful of almonds or blueberries or that ideal chill-pill, vitamin C.

Stay hydrated. When your energy is dwindling, drink a glass of water or juice.

Power Nap. It only takes 20 minutes to do the trick. Human circadian rhythms make late afternoons a more likely time to fall into deep sleep, which will leave you groggy, so better to nap just after lunch or late in the morning. Set the alarm so you don't sleep too long.

Baby Sleep Solutions

From Elizabeth Pantley, author of The No Cry Sleep Solution.

When: Night is Day and Day is Night
Do This: To help reset her body clock, have your baby nap during the day in the main area of the house, with all the family noise and light that implies. At night, think dark and unexciting. White noise is good for newborns used to the hum of the womb, where it's even louder than a vacuum cleaner. 

When: Morning Reveille is Too Early
Do This: Black-out curtains and a white noise machine can help. If your baby is waking up still tired and cranky, treat a predawn wake-up as you would a middle of the night one and don't get up for the day until sunrise. If they're raring to go, sorry, but five may just be a respectable hour if you've been sleeping for ten hours already.

When: Baby's Making Weird Sounds
Do This: Expect lots of grunts, whimpers, outright cries that don't necessarily signal awakening. Wait a minute or two before you do anything. If you're worried, check with your doctor to make sure it's not sleep apnea.

When: Your Good Sleeper's Gone Bad
Do This: Blame growth spurts, teething, developmental milestones. Just continue with usual bedtime routine and keep overnight interactions short and sweet. Without picking the baby up, place a comforting hand on her chest for a few minutes and make gentle rocking motions and repeat "shhhh" close to her ear.

When: The Pacifier Keeps Getting Lost
Do This: Have several spares strewn around the crib.

When: The Kid Only Wants to Sleep in the Car Seat
Do this: Create a cozy nest with a crib divider. And swaddle; a tight swaddle often stops newborns from startling themselves awake. If it's motion he seeks, try a baby hammock, a rocking cradle, or vibrating crib accessories.

When: She'll Only Fall Asleep While Being Held
Do this: When your baby begins to fall asleep transfer her to her crib or cradle — but keep your hands on her, pat and rub her, and even keep your face near her making a "shhhhh" sound. Babies adjust to new sleep routines, but it does take more than a day or two for this to happen.

Beyond Good Night Moon

There's no more restful pre-bed ritual out there than storytime.  Here are favorite bedtime reads from Lisa Von Drasek, children's librarian at Bank Street College of Education. Her top ten:

1. Time For Bed, Mem Fox
2. The Sleepy Little Alphabet, Judy Sierra
3. Kiss Good Night, Amy Hest
4. Owl Babies, Martin Waddell
5. Llama Llama Red Pajama, Anna Dewdney
6. Bear Snores On, Karma Wilson
7. Once A Lullaby, B.P. Nichol
8. Dinosaur vs. Bedtime, Bob Shea
9. A Visitor for Bear, Bonny Becker
10. The Going to Bed Book, Sandra Boynton

Best Baby Sleep Aides

No, we don't mean Nyquil.  Our must-have list of sleep paraphernalia:

• Security Blanket (aka silkie, blanky, lovie)

• Black-out shades (for early reveille prevention)

• Lullabye CD

• White noise machine if there's household or street noise

• Swaddling blankets for newborns or sleep sacks for older babies

• A co-sleeper (easier to manage for feedings than a bassinet; lets babies learn to sleep in their own space)

And Finally, In Defense of Crying-It-Out

Dr. Judith Owens, pediatric sleep expert and Director of the Pediatric Sleep Disorders Clinic at  Hasbro Children's Hospital in Providence, RI, weighs in:
 
"No matter what anyone says, there's really no sleep training for getting babies and toddlers to fall asleep on their own that doesn't involve some crying. A certain amount is inevitable; it's the way non-verbal babies protest, and it's perfectly understandable that they will do so for a few days when the regime changes.

Think of it as short-term pain for long-term gain (like 99% of parenting).  Sleep deprived parents aren't at their best during the day. And keep in mind that your average two-year-old would probably also like to eat ice cream 24-7, but we as parents recognize that this is probably not a good idea, and can stand our ground on this one despite the protest.

There's no evidence that "ferberizing" (and Dick Ferber actually hates the term) will be psychologically damaging to anybody except perhaps parents, for whom the wailing will live on. And if you start by putting the baby to sleep "drowsy but awake" from four months on, you'll probably avoid having to do any formal sleep training at all.

But then she came three weeks early.

I had gone in for a routine early morning OB appointment. Pretty soon, I found myself in a cab speeding to the hospital after my doctor determined that my water had broken and had probably been leaking for the past week. At the time, my thoughts were more on figuring out how to contact my sleeping boyfriend, whose phone I knew was turned off, than they were on dealing with all my unfinished business.

Thanks to a friend who had our keys, my boyfriend was roused and made it to the hospital before our baby did. And despite the urgency I had felt during my appointment, things didn't move so speedily once there and we had plenty of time to kill. So in between watching bad TV and sneaking snacks, we perused the cord blood brochures lining the nurse's station.

They looked a lot like the ones I had spent the last nine months ignoring in my doctor's office. On the cover was a cute little tot with her T-shirt pulled up to reveal a cute little bellybutton. The promise of umbilical cord stem cells and amazing predictions for their use in curing everything from blood disorders to leukemia served as text. Rounding this out was a section dedicated to testimonials from parents of sick kids who were deeply grateful that they had banked.

Once I bothered to look at it, the pitch was pretty effective. Suddenly, the $2,000 collection fee and $250 a year storage cost didn't seem so outrageous. I mean, this was our daughter's future health we were talking about!

So we went for it.

A few months later I asked a midwife friend for her thoughts on cord blood banking. She scoffed, telling me that the reality of any child ever actually being cured of a disease due to her own cord blood was pretty miniscule. She hadn't banked blood for either of her daughters and slept just fine at night. She also gently mentioned that some people viewed private banking as uncharitable and instead opted to donate cord blood to a public registry. This, she explained, was not only free, but was done for the greater good. Publicly banked blood could be used to treat medical conditions in anyone who was a match. Oh.

Now with my second baby due in a month, and despite the fact that my boyfriend is still on the fence about the issue, I am not inclined to bank privately again. Not only is the cost prohibitive, but the motives of these banks seem more driven by profit than science. Subsequent research alerted me to some things I hadn't realized the first time around.

For example, the American Academy of Pediatrics doesn't support the practice of private cord blood banking and challenges the claims that doing so is a form of biological insurance. Calling the private storage of cord blood "unwise," they explain that people can almost never be treated by their own cord blood, because those stem cells would likely be affected by the very condition you were hoping to cure!

On the flip side, a little more poking around the internet did teach me that the cord blood we stored for our daughter might not be totally worthless. There is a 25% chance that siblings will be a perfect match for each others's cells. This means that the blood I banked for my older child might actually be beneficial for my younger one. I guess that's less creepy than people who specifically have a baby in the hopes that its bone marrow could be used to treat a sick older sibling, yet it still seems weird.

A recent conversation with my father almost made me reconsider private banking. He was nervous when I mentioned that I was probably going to skip out on banking for the upcoming baby and put scary thoughts in my head. These weren't about the medical risks I could avoid. Rather they were about the resentment and sibling rivalry I was already creating between the still gestating fetus and his big sister.

Still, it's seeming more and more likely that if we bank again, we'll go the public route. Of course, doing that requires a bit of planning. Finding a place to store blood privately turns out to be a lot more straightforward than tracking down a legitimate public bank and making sure the hospital where you're delivering does cord blood collection at all. And in the grand scheme of things, researching this falls behind figuring out when I should go on maternity leave, locating a mohel who won't balk at my kids' non-Jewish dad, and coming up with a name for this upcoming baby.

Maybe one day cord blood banking will be a routine part of the post-birth experience. But since it currently isn't, we'll just try to do what makes the most sense in the moment.

Of course, both the idea of using my daughter's blood for my next child, and the issue of banking blood just to be fair, might be moot. When my boyfriend and I started to talk about this the other night, he reminded me of something I'd forgotten. At some point in the last year we got a letter from the cord blood folks. The credit card we put the storage fee payments on had expired.

"Did you ever give them a new one?" he asked.

"Nope. You?" I said.

"Nope," he told me.

So maybe our decision has already been made for us.

Dear Lost,

Any parent who's lost track of a child for more than a few moments knows how terrifying it feels: the frenzied scan for his face, the increasingly hysterical name-calling and the sky-rocketing heart rate. The good news is that it's a very, very rare event for a public "disappearance" to end in a real tragedy. But it's still good to talk to your kid about what to do if he can't find you.

For older children — who are more likely to be out alone, or at least on a longer leash — there are some important lessons to be learned about assessing and managing risky situations. But even a young child can be taught some strategies for staying safe and speeding a reunion.

According to experts, here's what you should teach your young son to do, should he get lost:

1. Tell him to stay in one place. It's easier for a caregiver to find a child if he stays put.

2. Tell him to call out for you. You may hear the shouts and, if not, his yelling will alert people to the fact that he's a lost child, which can lead to help.

3. Tell him to look for someone trustworthy . . . like another mommy with kids. Stats show that mothers are the most likely to be helpful in a lost child situation. If your child knows what a police uniform looks like, that's another option. Mothers are often the first suggestion for very little kids, however, as looking for the right uniform can be confusing.

4. Tell him to give out any information about you. He can tell the other mother or cop his name and your name and anything else he can remember (cell phone, street address). Young kids can't be expected to retain a lot of detail so you could consider an ID for your kid — either in or attached to his backpack or written onto his shirts or shoes. This is something you may want to consider when traveling or going to a very crowded and confusing place.

5. Don't teach your child to avoid ALL strangers. The chances of abduction or other untoward experience in public is really quite small, and strangers account for relatively few of the tragedies that do occur. But your kid might get lost or be stranded in someway that could benefit from the help of . . . strangers. If he's afraid of them, he may not get that help. You can teach your child how to respond if something scary happens, especially if the child's old enough to be out and about on his/her own.

The goal of all this preparation is to give your child confidence. There's no reason to go through lots of worst-case scenarios, but rehearsing some of the above in a straightforward fire-drill kind of way can help drum in the protocol. And then, in the unlikely scenario that he finds himself lost and scared, he'll have a few ideas about how to deal.

Have a question? Email parentaladvisory@babble.com

Click to buy Ceridwen and Rebecca's book!

Before Isaac was born, Jennifer and I decided that it would be best to have him sleep next to our bed in a co-sleeper. I was still occasionally having nightmares that left me flailing about on the mattress and I didn't want to risk whacking Isaac in my sleep. But our decision ended up making little difference.

Although we put Isaac down for the night in the co-sleeper, Jennifer would take him out of it for his first nighttime feedings and most of the time — even on the nights Jennifer could have sworn she had put him back — we would wake up to find him lying between us.

When he wasn't crying, it was a pleasure to share a mattress with Isaac. He was warm and mushy and sometimes his heavy breathing made him sound like a purring cat.

His cat sounds notwithstanding, Isaac's presence in our bed wasn't usually a cause for celebration. On a bad night, he would be up almost every hour. I would fall back asleep within minutes, but Jennifer wasn't so lucky. Once he was on our mattress, Isaac ate nonstop and sometimes slept with his hand on Jennifer's breast, as if to ensure that I wouldn't take off with his loot. As he grew older, he began to pinch and claw as well.

"It's like going to sleep every night at an S&M club," Jennifer said.

I thought the plan sounded great until we sat down to discuss the logistics. If Jennifer was no longer going to be feeding Isaac, someone was going to have to comfort him when he woke up in the middle of the night. And since Jennifer had already carried the burden for months, it was now my turn. I accepted my new responsibility without protest, and, as I expected, the transition to milkless nights did not go over so well with our new roommate. The first sign of Isaac waking up was typically the soft thumping of his swaddled feet against his mattress, and the sound alone could strike terror in our hearts. "Oh God, please no," I would say at the sound of those first thumps.

"It can't be," Jennifer would say. "He's been asleep for less than an hour."

And then more thumps, now slightly louder — the footsteps of the approaching villain in the scary movie.

"It just can't be."

(Cue the haunting music.)

"No, no, no."

And then the desperate begging. But here the movie analogy breaks down because rather than begging for mercy from the approaching villain, I would be begging for mercy from my fellow victim.

"Please just wake up with him this time," I would say, fully aware that only hours earlier I had confidently assured her that I would be the one to get up and that it really wasn't a big deal.

"But you said — "

"I know. I know. But . . ."

"But what?"

"I'll give you twenty bucks."

"Sam, we share a bank account. You can't bribe—"

"One hundred dollars!"

I knew, of course, that it could be worse. It was worse, in fact, for our upstairs neighbor, Steve, who had to listen to Isaac scream throughout the night but got none of the benefits of parenthood. Almost every night we would hear Steve wake up after Isaac and then pace around his apartment. This made our stress significantly worse, particularly on the mornings that we saw him coming down the stairs looking as bad as us. After one particularly bad night, Jennifer emailed Steve an apologetic note, to which he replied kindly, and then asked if it would be possible for us to move Isaac to another room.

The next night we dragged Isaac's crib into the kitchen/dining area of our one-bedroom apartment. We were happy to experiment with the new arrangement for Steve's sake, but Isaac sleeping next to the kitchen created a new set of dilemmas. Specifically, we could no longer eat after seven p.m. We managed to avoid using the kitchen for the first few nights, but soon Jennifer and I were making night raids to the pantry on our tiptoes, both of us feeling as though Isaac were the parent, and we the mischievous children.

But the night raids weren't our biggest concern at that moment. Our more serious problem was getting Isaac to fall asleep in his crib. We'd always helped Isaac go to bed for the first time of the night by letting him hold on to one of our hands. It wasn't particularly difficult to reach into the co-sleeper, but giving him a hand in the crib meant standing hunched over the railing for as long as an hour. To escape from Isaac's side, Jennifer and I would try to inch our hands down his body, but even when Isaac's eyes were closed he remained on high alert for such shenanigans. Sometimes I would manage to slip my hand downward so that I was holding only the loose fabric on his pajama footsies and yet somehow he could sense when I let go. It was as though he had installed his own high-tech motion-detector security system in his crib.

Ferber argues that sleeping alone in cribs teaches children to see themselves as independent individuals, and that even if babies seem happy sleeping in bed with their parents, it's probably not a good idea to allow it to continue. In drawing this link between sleeping alone and independence, Ferber was perhaps unknowingly regurgitating a uniquely American myth.

In a 1997 attack on Ferber, the science journalist Robert Wright makes a good point that somehow rarely came up in twentieth-century America. "It isn't obvious to me how a baby would develop a robust sense of autonomy while being confined to a small cubicle with bars on the side and rendered powerless to influence its environment," Wright notes. "I'd be willing to look at the evidence behind this claim, but there isn't any." Nor, for that matter, is there any reason to assume, as Ferber does, that the fear of sleeping alone indicates an emotional problem. Wright can barely contain his dismay at Ferber's insistence that "there must be a reason" why babies are afraid of sleeping alone.

Yes, there must. Here's one candidate: Maybe your child's brain was designed by natural selection over millions of years during which mothers slept with their babies. Maybe back then if babies found themselves completely alone at night it often meant something horrific had happened — the mother had been eaten by a beast, say. Maybe the young brain is designed to respond to this situation by screaming frantically so that any relatives within earshot will discover the child. Maybe, in short, the reason that kids left alone sound terrified is that kids left alone naturally get terrified. Just a theory. But then Wright, who writes regularly about morality and evolution, would be the first to say that there is no reason to assume that what's natural is also what's good.

"Quick, turn up the TV," I said. "We can't listen to the screaming."

Jennifer turned the volume almost all the way up, but behind the roar of The Simpsons we could still hear our son wailing. "I can't do this," Jennifer said. "I'm going out on the balcony."

"Okay," I said. I spread out on the floor and tried to watch The Simpsons. Then I got up and opened the door to the balcony.

"I think it's been five minutes," I said.

Jennifer checked the time on her cellphone. "It's been less than two minutes," she said.

"Right," I said. I lay down again, listened to Isaac, and got back up.

"Is it five minutes yet?" I asked.

"It's not even three," Jennifer said.

"All right, well, maybe I should just go. I mean, by the time I get there . . ."

We both appreciated that it took only ten seconds to walk to his crib, but Jennifer could hear Isaac through the open door and she was breaking down along with me.

"Okay, just go," she said.

I returned to Isaac's crib. My plan was to reassure him that he was not alone, put his pacifier back in his mouth, and then walk away.

]]>Sam Apple