So, have you ever heard of a family raising sextuplets on a reality TV show? No, not that family. The network WE tv launched its new show Raising Sextuplets in June, which profiles the brood of Jenny and Bryan Masche, of Lake Havasu, Arizona and their six two-year-olds (predictably adorable Bailey, Savannah, Molli, Cole, Grant and Blake.) WE TV first started following the Masche family with cameras for a documentary on Jenny's pregnancy (she did IUI after two-and-a-half years of trying to get pregnant.) So far the show has none of the drama of Jon and Kate (whew) but some of the fun and chaos: Jon tries to lose his "baby weight," the kids whack each other in the tub. As if you needed any more reason to feel inferior, Jenny works nights as a physician's assistant in the ER and runs marathons.

Babble talked to Jenny about what makes them different from the Gosselins, why they did the show in the first place, and what parents of just one or two kids can learn from a mom who had to manage six bottles at the same time. — Jennifer V. Hughes

There has been such an enormous amount of negative publicity and reaction to Jon and Kate Gosselin lately — why in the world would you want to do this TV program, especially now?

You know, all the stuff about them makes me very, very nervous, but our show started out so long before any negative publicity ever came out about them . . . we were filming our documentary when I was pregnant. But we are very different people. Just because we have a show doesn't mean the same thing is going to happen to us. The only similarity I see between us is that we both have sextuplets.

Do you think there is something you can do with your situation to avoid the kind of media circus their lives have become?

Absolutely. It's all about choices; they were not in the media until Jon got photographed at a bar with another woman, and then it snowballed and got crazy. Brian and I, we're not perfect by any stretch, but we believe in Christ and we live our lives based on that, and a lot of the choices we make reflect on that. Hopefully we're grounded in that reality with God, and that will keep us from things that will bring us negative attention. I mean, we still have our moments of being angry, but . . .

Why did you decide to do the show to begin with?

When we got pregnant with the sextuplets and they asked us to document the pregnancy, we thought this was a one-time shot for us. It was a documentary — we never thought of a show. We loved it, we just thought it was fun. It was positive, and hopefully it will continue to be positive. If it ever starts to add stress in our lives, it's done.

Why do you think people are so fascinated by parents of multiples — the Jon and Kate thing, Octomom?

You know, I honestly don't know. My life seems really boring to me. I don't know anything different from sextuplets. But all my friends with one or two, their lives are so astronomically changed, people can't even fathom having six or five or four. They think, "I'm overwhelmed with one child; how the heck does someone do this?" Sometimes it can be encouraging to see someone's life that seems harder that yours. It helps to have perspective.

I'm sure you've heard about people making judgments about your decision to have so many babies, to do the show — what has bothered you the most and what did you do to deal with it?

You know, I don't look at anything. I don't read anything, because I want to guard my ears and my mind from negativity. As long as I please God and my husband and my family and the people around me can see that what we're doing is a positive thing, I don't care about what other people think.

What has been the most surprising thing you've experienced since having your children?

It's surprising that it's not as bad as we thought. I was so depressed when I delivered — I'm sure a lot of it was hormonal, I was sick, in the ICU. I had envisioned that this situation we got ourselves into was totally impossible. When you're that depressed and negative, then when you actually have the kids come home and you realize what a joy they are . . . They fulfill me in a way I've never been fulfilled in my life.

What has been the hardest moment so far?

The hardest part is making sure we focus on our marriage. The first year was really hard. I had six little people who were totally needy of me and I had a husband who was needy of me too, and I didn't have enough of me to go around. It's been a struggle but it's been good because it makes us work on it. If things are too easy you can get complacent.

What has been the best?

Absolutely the babies and our families. Our families rallied around us and it was so amazing. That and just regular people. I email a lady from South Africa to this day. She followed our pregnancy and we just became friends. It's cool when you meet people from all over the country who are praying for you.

What do you think parents of just one or two measly kids can learn from your experiences?

I think there are probably a lot of things I do wrong. Hopefully people will see that and say, "Oh yeah! I don't want to do that!" [Laughs.] I hope that people can learn how to let go of things and choose your battles. With only one kid you can fight a lot more battles. With us, we really have to let a lot of things go.

How do you get six toddlers to bed? Feed them? I'm talking logistics here.

You just do it. I fix dinner, I put it on the table . . . they're toddlers, they sit down, they eat, they run away. I can't physically force six of them to sit in chairs. Dinner time is just like that around here. They actually loved diaper changes because they got alone time with me. You learn how to be really, really patient. You do six of everything and that's your whole night. Once you get them down you take a breath and think, we survived the day.

I feel that way with one!

My friends with one all say the same thing! I just don't know any different.

How do you get anything else done? Dishes? Laundry?

I have to do everything when my kids are asleep. I do a huge clean up at naptime and a huge clean up at bedtime. My husband is really good at cleaning up the house. That's something I'm grateful for.

I know that multiples often have health difficulties —  are all of your children healthy?

They are totally healthy —  we feel so blessed.

So, are you going to have any more?

[Laughs.] No. My husband got fixed when they were four months old. That's done. C'mon, really?

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.

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?

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.

You started out playing in indie rock bands. How did you make the transition into being a children's artist?

When I first came to New York I actually tried to get work as an illustrator. I took my portfolio everywhere and collected a big, fat stack of rejection letters. Then I got into the music scene here. I had a band called Morgan Taylor's Rock Group. We had a moment, but in New York that can fizzle out fast. Morgan Taylor's Rock Group broke up and I put out a solo album. But after I played my record release party, I just felt like something was missing. Rachel, my wife, said, "Why don't you do that kids' book you've been thinking about?"

I had this stockpile of songs from when I first moved to New York and I was feeling really stimulated. I chose some songs from that, the ones that were sort of more colorful or silly or pretty, and I drew out images to accompany them. I had the "Pterodactyl Song, "The Eel Song," and I had this song "I Am From the Sun." As I was drawing out the images, I realized that the songs were written in first person, but the speaker wasn't me. It was more like a fictitious character. Years before I had started drawing this yellow, pointy-headed guy. He was floating around in my brain. I thought that maybe this project was the home for that character. And then it hit me, "Yes, of course! He's the one from the sun!" I drew out five or so of these songs and put them together in a book to try to get it published. One of the people we showed it to asked me if I wanted to animate it and we loved that idea. Once we put out the first DVD, the reaction was just instantaneous. All of the press started saying really nice things and I was like, "Wow, all I had to do was add cartoons to my music and now everybody's paying attention!" The song "I Jump on Cake" was originally a drawing in my portfolio.

Yes, I was wondering whether or not kids go home after your show and jump on cake.

[Laughs] I've had parents email me to say that their kids do.

You started Gustafer before you had children of your own. Has being a dad changed the project for you?

If anything, it's made us more business-oriented. Now we have to think along the lines of paying our bills and raising a family. Being a dad has made me realize, if this is what I'm going to do, I have to really be committed and do it.

What bands do you listen to that impact your songwriting?

I think I'm always trying to write Bread songs. Do you know the band Bread? Their biggest song was called "If." They were the premiere, '70s soft-rock balladeers: beautiful strings, heart-wrenching songs, a tiny bit cheesy. I think I loved them because my older brother and sister's record collection was in the house when I was born. I inherited their taste.

So you listen to a lot of '70s music?

Yeah, I do. I feel like that's the nucleus of Gustafer. When I was listening to that music, that's the time of my life when I started to be creative, around six or seven years old. For me, writing music is like chasing the feeling you have at that age. I guess that's where I tend to go for inspiration.

What do you think is up next for Gustafer?

Right now we're mixing and editing the live DVD. We recorded a show in San Francisco with a symphony orchestra made up of public school students. It was amazing. We're going to try to put it out next spring.

You have reached a pretty wide audience through Gustafer. Why do you think it's struck a chord with people of different ages?

I think that there are so many levels to it. For really young kids, Gustafer has bright images and soft, melodic music. With the six- and seven-year-olds, they're right at that age when you begin to conceptualize. They are the best to play for because they're just looking at me like, "Is this real?" Kids who are a little older start to pick up on the humor. There are even some teenagers who come to my shows. I think they just like Gustafer because it's kind of weird and trippy. [Laughs.] But, my target demographic is probably people my own age.

Really?

Yeah. Most people my age have kids who are four, five and six, and they're mainly the ones coming to my shows. I'm of the generation that, when we were a bit younger, all we did was go out to bars to see bands. Now that we're parents we can't really do that so often. My feeling is, why should those people have to suffer through kids' music that's, what I call the "silly hat bands"? You're allowed to like whatever you want, but there are a lot of people, like me, who grew up with alternative music, like R.E.M. Those are the people who have young kids now and I want to play something that appeals to them as much as it appeals to their children.

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.

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."

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.

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?

We hear your son is a big fan of the Cartoon Network?

He's a fan of the Cartoon Network, all that stuff. He watches a bunch of them. He has them all TiVo'd on his Direct TV box!

So how did this opportunity to star on one of their shows come about?

They asked if it was something I'd be interested in doing [as part of a partnership between the NBA and the Cartoon Network], and I asked him if he'd be interested in doing it. He said, "Yeah!"

Jaelen goes to public school. How do his classmates react knowing who his dad is?

I don't know — he really doesn't talk to us about that. You get the looks and the waves 'hi' when you go pick him up, but besides that I think it's really normal for him.

What about you — how do you carve out the family time with three kids and eighty-two games a year plus practices?

You have to juggle responsibilities, take care of your responsibility at work and then come home and take care of your home responsibilities. You just figure a way out.

How does being so family-centered affect you as a player?

It gives you motivation. When you look and see your kids in the stands or when you leave and they say, "Have a good game!," it's extra motivation to go out and perform to show the best of your capabilities.

]]>Jeanne Sager http://www.babble.com/The-Pregnancy-Bible-How-to-be-a-perfect-labor-partner/

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.)

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.

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."

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.

Ziggy?s third solo album, Family Time, is his first kids' CD, and  it?s got a mind-blowing array of guest performers. (Willie Nelson! Laurie Berkner! Paul Simon! Even Jamie Lee Curtis shows up ? twice.) The album was also a family affair. His mother and sister perform, as does his four-year-old daughter, Judah. (Ziggy has four other kids, aged 20, 17, 14 and 2.) 

Ziggy talked to Babble about his interest in education, his famous dad, and the expertise he's gained from raising all those kids. ? Jennifer V. Hughes

You have some major stars on your new album. What was it like bringing together such a wildly diverse group of artists?

It was a privilege for me, you know what I?m saying? It was very exciting to bring in guest artists. 

Is there a thread musically or emotionally between all of them and your work?

I felt something for them, when I was going to put together a group of people who I would work with, I had to find people I have a good feeling for, it has to be a good vibe. It?s a cool vibe,  the spirit in their music. It?s hard to explain, but everything cannot always make sense ? sometimes it?s just a feeling.

The proceeds from the sale of the CD will go toward the Chepstowe Basic School in Jamaica ? tell me about that project.

The school is for the very young. I wanted to get into education for kids so I adopted a school and we started doing some development. Some of the money will help with more classrooms, more books, better pay for the teachers. I want it to be an example for the rest of Jamaica in terms of what we can do. 

You know, I read that Ziggy is not your given name ? it?s David. Where did Ziggy come from?

Ziggy came from my father ? it?s from how I used to kick the soccer ball.

Maybe this is a silly question, but what do you think it is about music and children ? why are children so drawn to music?

I think that music, beats, melody, sound are a natural part of our DNA, our vibe. It?s just a part of the cycle of our lives, we?re born, we have eyes, we have music. It?s part of us from the beginning. We?re drawn to it because it?s a part of us.

Other than reggae, what other styles of music do you and your kids listen to?

My kids listen to my father?s music, which is reggae of course. They just listen to music that makes us feel good ? rock, jazz, anything. For me it changes depending on what I?m feeling. I?ve listened to Jack Johnson, Green Day, I listen to African music. I listen to a wide variety, I don?t think there is any constant. I go from one thing to the next.

Many of the songs on the album have messages ? saving the earth, caring for your brother. What do you think little kids will take from those kind of songs?

I don?t know what they can take from it ? I hope they take something. The songs have different layers to them, it wasn?t that it was important, it?s just how we did it. As the kids grow they can understand the deeper meanings of the songs. It will stay with you from birth to old age.

Your dad was such an influential artist, so renowned and beloved. What is that like for you, as a musician?

Well, I was just always trying to play music and create something. I?m very adventurous and so the aspect of being my father?s son never really struck me as any difficulty or a problem or whatever. I just wanted to make music. What he did was not a deciding factor for me.

What do you think you would have done if you were not a musician?

If I was not a musician, I?d still be a musician. Being a musician is just what I?m on earth for. I might not be talking to you, I might not be making records but I?d be making music.

Do you think any of your kids will follow in your musical footsteps?

I don?t know for sure ? it?s possible, but I don?t care at this point. I?m not thinking about that now. I just want them to get a good education and a good upbringing and be good human beings. I want them to be good people first.

Since you have five kids ? which automatically makes you a parenting expert in my book ?

Oh, yeah? Really?

? what?s the most important piece of advice you would give to another parent?

I don?t know ? it can?t be one thing for every  parent because every child is different. Patience is important, discipline is important, you have to learn balance. I guess that would be my general advice, keep it balanced? don?t lean one way or the other way too far.

You know, come to think of it ? the lyrics to "Three Little Birds" might just be good parenting advice ?.

(Laughs) Oh yeah, sure.

Ziggy Marley is on tour! Check out his tour dates here.

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?

She’s also the lady behind Lemlem, the cute new clothing line you may have seen in the spring J. Crew catalog. Lemlem is another charitable endeavor, and one that keeps the New Yorker in what she describes as a constant state of chaos.  Babble roused her for an early-morning phone chat recently about kids, fashion and the mystery of why nobody makes good clothes for girls ten and up. — Tammy La Gorce

Lemlem’s been around for a while, but you’ve just joined forces with J. Crew. Right?  

We’ve had the line for a year and a half, and we just started this partnership with J. Crew for the Spring 09 season. We showed them the line and they loved it — they’re very encouraging and supportive, and the catalog just came out and we’re getting great reviews. It’s really cool.

It’s for kids up to size 6X, and you’ve just introduced a few Lemlem things for women. How did the line start?

Well, I had gone back home to Ethiopia on a visit about three years ago, and I started looking at the clothes, the traditional clothes and how they’ve always been made the same way — it’s our traditional art. Men weave, and it’s a talent that’s passed on from father to son.

So the women don’t weave? They don’t have a hand in making the clothes?

Yes — the women spin the cotton. That’s how it’s traditionally done. So some of our products are hand-spun, which gives them a soft and very cozy feeling. The texture is incredible. This is my little way of trying to support their creative talent, by bringing them to the Western market where they can showcase their talent. It’s also so the Western market can experience something beautiful from a different world. So it sort of helps both worlds.

How does that work? Are part of the proceeds sent back to Ethiopia?

No. I really got inspired seeing Bono do his RED campaign. I like this sort of social entrepreneurship — it’s so interesting to be able to employ people so they can be sustainable. The sustainability factor is so important. I love that whole theory of, "Teach a man to fish rather than giving him a fish." This is a different sort of helping that not only helps the weavers but helps the industry in Ethiopia. It sort of gives it credibility. I really want to help make Africa the next place where designers go to make their clothes.

Does that fit in with your World Health Organization ambassadorship? Is Lemlem directly related to helping women and children?

At the end of the day everything is sort of related to poverty. I’m trying to make people independent there so they can support a family. 

What’s the Lemlem aesthetic? Does it match the J. Crew classic preppy-clean look?

Well, it’s very summery and colorful, and J. Crew is known for all those colors as well. The way it fits in is that you can dress up your J. Crew stuff with a piece from Lemlem, a unique piece. You take your regular J. Crew things and you mix it up with a Lemlem skirt and you’re good to go.

You have two kids — your son Suhul is eight and daughter Raee is three. Did they inspire Lemlem?

Oh my God, yes. The way this became a children’s line is because I enjoy buying for them more than I do for myself! The clothes for them are so much more interesting and fun. My daughter has been part of the team forever. We try things on her. She plays dress-up with us. My mother-in-law actually calls my daughter Lemlem — it means to bloom, or when something is sort of lush and green and fertile, in Ethiopia.

Is clothing design a natural offshoot of modeling?

No — it wasn’t something I’ve always thought about at all. But being in fashion put me in a good position to be able to help the weavers. Things happen for a reason.

Do you now travel to Ethiopia a lot to make sure things are going the way you want them to?

I go back at least once a year, maybe a few times more. It’s sort of an organized situation there now. We’ve already done the difficult work of getting it up and running. Now it’s amazing for us to watch the craftsmanship that comes out of there. They’ve latched onto the idea of exceptional work, and it’s really great to see they’re getting it. At first it was really funny because when we’d send them designs, we’d be so specific about every inch of the fabric, or how we want the design to be this way or that way. They thought we were loony. They thought we were these crazy people in New York. With this J. Crew launch I think a lot more people will be aware of the line so it will expand — then we’ll be able to hire a lot more people and we’ll really see the difference.
 
Is it a struggle to be a mom, a fashion designer, an ambassador, and a supermodel all at once?

You know, not really. I love that I have the chance to do all these different things. I’ve always been into different things, and the more things you do, the more things come up that you want to do. And see. I handle it very chaotically, though. I handle what needs to be handled at any given moment and then go from there.

Do the kids respond well to the chaos?

My son is eight now, which is insane, so he’s used to it. And my daughter is three going on twenty. She loves it.

Do models obsess over changes in their bodies after childbirth more than non-models, do you think?

I don’t know; I guess I only know one side of the story. It probably depends on the model. If you’re going to go back into modeling you have to get right back into shape, that’s for sure. But actually I think the obsession about bodies has kind of reached the limit with everybody. There are a lot of model mommies now. So many babies backstage at shows.

What do you think about how Americans dress their kids? Too grown-up looking? Chic?

I think it depends on the age. Younger kids, under ten, it’s all casual. Boys are harder to dress because there are not a lot of options for them. But girls are tricky once they reach the age of ten, because they do wear overly mature clothes sometimes, and it’s a bit too much.

Why don’t more designers do clothes for that age group? Why not Lemlem?

I don’t know if it’s for us because of the way our clothes are made, the hand-weaving. We can’t go in a gazillion different directions. But if you’re going to do regular clothes, I don’t see why you wouldn’t make nice clothes for that age group. I don’t know if girls buy the overly mature clothes because they like them and if that’s what’s driving the market, or if it’s that nobody’s giving them anything good. They do dress like little adults. I don’t know how my daughter will dress when she’s that age — I’ll see what she comes up with and talk to you then.

Does your son have a personal style?

He’s a typical boy — T-shirts and jeans. If I ask him to wear a shirt, like a button-down shirt, it’s like the whole world’s collapsing.

Is it cool for him to have a supermodel as a mom?

It’s not something we talk about a lot. He knows what I do and he thinks it’s funny. I don’t know how he addresses it at school, but we try to keep it low-key. We don’t want it to affect his world.

That sounds like sensible mom-speak. Are you a very hands-on mom?

Yes. I do my Lemlem work from my home office. I like to be here when the kids come home.

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.