Spoonfed

To be young and wide-eyed

Last night I went to a mixer where moms meet with potential babysitters. A sort of speed dating for babysitters. It was held in a trendy little boutique, and I was one of the first moms to arrive. There were about 15 very young, very cute, very trendy college girls milling around, all dolled up, made up, dressed in their trendiest best, bejeweled and mani-pedi'ed. As if it were sorority rush, and us moms were the cool girls they hoped to be accepted by. (And I couldn't help but think: only a young girl would think she'd improve her chances of getting a babysitting/nanny job by looking like a total hottie...)

Every last one of them was so darn cute and peppy and ambitious and ready to take on the whole wide world -- it really made me feel old and remember those days?

What really got me was one of the girls telling me she was only available at nights, because she'd just gotten a summer internship with an ad agency in Boulder.

Being in the business, I asked: "Which one?"

"Um, Crispin Porter, um..."

"Bogusky?"

"Yes," she said, as though it were the biggest coincidence in the world, "Have you heard of them?"

I only chuckled and congratulated her on landing the bomb of all internships.

"What will you be doing?" I asked.

"I have no idea," she said.

Ah, to be young again.

Skinny jeans for toddlers

Good Lord. Girls have the rest of their lives to be uncomfortable. Why put toddlers in skinny jeans?

| desperately seeking |

... babysitters.

If you're like me, it feels pretty daunting to try and find a good one. You can ask friends and neighbors for referrals, or put a posting on Craigslist, but really, take a look.

If you live in Stapleton -- you can post in the StapletonOnline Classifieds section, but your post will forever go unanswered, because you have to live in Stapleton to get access to the Classifieds. The only eyeballs reading these posts are other moms.

But, good news: MommyMixer is coming to Denver.

This service puts Moms and babysitters together. You all get together, the Moms get a notebook with the babysitter resumes and availability, they get to do face-to-face interviews, and voila, you've got a network of babysitters.

Moms, would you pay $100 to find a good network of babysitters?

| women can be mean |

Go read "Joys of a working mom," in today's Denver Post.

Jessica Peck Corry muses on the mothering business: all the parenting experts saying you should stay at home with the kids, versus the experts saying you'll fall irrevocably behind in the workforce if you quit working.

She recalls an incident:

At a Christmas party with educated female friends, they seemed to gang up on me, questioning what it must be like to spend so many hours away from my daughter each day. Women, I've learned, are so much crueler than men..."

A good friend of mine -- a working mom with a fantastic job that she loves-- had the same thing happen.

Having recently moved to Stapleton, she attended the local block party, where it came out that she worked full time. One Neighbor Mom jumped on her, blathering on and on about how she had tried to work, but just couldn't bear to have her children's milestones be witnessed by a stranger, and how she used to work for a Famous Big Ad Agency in New York, and really, her career couldn't mean less to her compared to the pure joy of raising her child...

My friend went home in tears.

I wondered if I have ever gone overboard in defending my reasons to stay at home with my kid. Women hold each other to such high standards, it seems! At my Stapleton block party, I was one of the only stay-at-home moms, and I found myself answering the "and what do you do?" questions with vague references to my freelancing, lest they think I'm spoiled.

Why do we feel we owe people an explanation for the choices we make?

| einstein |

All the Baby Einstein videos are most definitely NOT producing baby geniuses.

Really, as if anyone truly thought they would? Come on, all moms know that the videos are Baby Heroin. Need to stack the dishwasher? Pop in a video.

| no kiddie furniture |

Banish all that white plastic bubble furniture!

| sandbagging |

The Today Show did this thing on the little white lies that go on in a marriage. Sandbagging, as its known in poker, is the same thing as being a pool shark. You pretend to be a lousy player for a couple of games, and then you kill it and win all the money. On the Today Show, it's husbands and wives pretending to the other that their life is one big slave fest (yeah, I don't really follow the analogy either, but it was a Meredith piece...).

Apparently this is something that stay-at-home moms (assuming they were career women before baby) fall prey to, where the minute their husband gets home, they complain about every intricate detail of the hard work they did that day: vaccuuming up the massive amounts of pet hair, the insurmountable Mount Laundry, the kids' bad behavior. Although it might seem like staying at home with the kid is easy, it's a tremendous amount of work, never ending.

What they don't tell their husband is how they had a really wonderful morning, because it was 75 degrees in November, so they took the baby and the dog on a lovely hike on Mount Sanitas, and it was great exercise, and the baby loved it and they sang "You are my sunshine" the whole way.

Because the hike isn't "work," it's not part of the "job" of being a mom. It sounds an awful lot like playing hookey while the hubby is off slaving away in an office for 10 hours a day.

And vice versa. Husbands on business trips to exotic places like Tokyo will phone home and, when their wife asks how Tokyo is, they'll say: I just wish I was home with you and the kids. And the wife knows that's a bunch of baloney; she just wishes for a little bit of adult conversation, a bit of, "Oh, you should see the streets and taste the food and talk to the people...."

The Today Show fear-mongering spin, of course, is that these little "sandbagging" white lies will lead to fractured relationships and infidelity, but really it just reminds me to always tell my husband the good parts of the day first -- the way the baby held onto the coffee table to stand up, and I barely had to hold him; the way we took some extra time on our morning walk to talk to the neighbors; the way our puppy has become little Mama Maggie, always close to the baby. It reminds me to tell him how much I love being a mom, how grateful I am that I get to stay home.

| dog friendly |

A great secret place to take your dog off-leash: Dry Creek trail in Boulder.

Stick the little'un in the Baby Bjorn, let the dog run after the prairie dogs, and get a brisk walk in for yourself. Fun for moms, dogs and babies.

| children's museum |

Why, I wonder, is this a museum, as opposed to the more descriptive "Playground" or "Romper Room" or "House of Chaos" or "Wonderland"? I wonder if "Museum" keeps certain folks away, who think it might be something to just look at, but not touch?

At any rate, the baby and I took the stroller down the hill and walked to the Children's Museum today.

I had no idea what to expect, but it was a nice day, and I figure 5 months is a good time to get him around other kids and see what he does, whether he'd even notice them.

When we first walked in, I thought it was a little lame. There is a whole separate area for babies and toddlers, with a meadow theme. The baby area is a big pillowy pond, where babies can just lie on their backs and roll around.

He loved it.

I mean, really loved it. There were sounds of birds chirping, there were mobiles attached to lily pads, and there were puppets, and most of all, there were other kids. He just sat and watched the other kids, entranced. For two whole hours, we lolled around in there, and he laughed, and pulled his toes, and was happy.

One to definitely add to the activity list for any stay at home moms (I know, I know, there are so dang few of us!) with a little cabin fever.

| ten hours |

It's official: Baby Spoonfed has just slept a whopping ten hours!!! (And still going, although he's starting to stir.)

I highly, highly recommend the book Babywise if you are looking to get your baby sleeping through the night. I followed this book's recommendations, at the advice of a friend, from the first day we brought him home. I just thought he was this amazingly easy baby who was naturally on a schedule of feeding/waking/sleeping, who hardly ever cries, who slept 5-6 hours through the night since he was 2 weeks old, but other friends assure me, it's because I got him on the Babywise schedule.

I know, I know, it's not for everyone. But if you're at all like me, and like things to be somewhat predictable and scheduled, this book is great. And of course you don't have to follow it super strictly -- I had kind of forgotten about the book until another friend reminded me of it.