Stick'em Up

There are a lot of things I didn't know were controversial until I became a mother. Things like breastfeeding in public, letting your baby cry themselves to sleep and circumcision. Another something that falls in that category is vaccinating your children.

James just had his first round of shots today (they start later in Denmark than in the States) and I've been reading up on the issue a little more lately. The best recent article I've read on the subject that seems to go beyond both extremes in the vaccination debate is The Needle and the Studies Done published recently in Brain, Child. It seemed to give a fair hearing to both sides of the argument and offers a middle ground (complete with the necessary Dr. Sears endorsement).

I've never had a good grasp on why some parents choose not to vaccinate their children but I tended to take a "live and let live" attitude toward the whole thing. Largely because I thought that not vaccinating a child was only risking infection in the nonvaccinated child. But then I was reading in passing about the measles outbreak in the States. Measles is still an active disease that effects 20 million people each year. In this case it was brought in by travelers and picked up by nonvaccinated children who in some cases passed it along to infants who haven't yet had their MMR vaccine. Infants like James.

To me this goes a little beyond live and let live.

Hello Pipe Dream

From Slate.com: Clinton-Obama, Obama-Clinton: How they could run together and take turns being president.

I think it's telling that this article is entirely a discussion of legality while nothing is devoted to how two great egos would have to bend to make this happen, let alone make it happen and somehow not be a complete train wreck.

Arriving Late to the Party

Terry Gross loves The Wire. You know, Terry Gross. The host of NPR's Fresh Air. I started downloading the podcast of the radio program shortly after we arrived in Denmark and generally really enjoy the subject matter. Discussions of books, movies, current events that have nothing whatsoever to do with childrearing, infant sleep patterns or random toddler behavior.

It's how I came to discover there was a television show on HBO called The Wire, which is apparently completely fascinating if one is to judge by the fact Fresh Air devoted seven interviews to the show in barely over three months. By interview #3 I was annoyed, by interview #5 I was voicing complaints to people who clearly didn't care (my husband and my toddler), and by interview #7 I begrudgingly suggested to Michael we add the show to our queue of mass media to not-very-legally download. I suppose it was inevitable as I discovered late last night that The Wire is #85 on the list of Stuff White People Like.

I learned that I'm already on board the choo-choo train by liking coffee, downloading podcasts to my iPod and... huh, what do you know... public radio.

News Alert: New Moms Forget Stuff and Feel Like Idiots When They Do

Postpartum changes may bring on 'momnesia'

I love the subtitle: "Coping usually takes a few adjustments — plus, a sense of humor helps!"

Ok, Mickey. Whatever you say.

What’s in a Name?

We’ve begun the process of registering James with the local church parish and applying for his Danish birth certificate. This brings up one interesting feature of The Danish Way of Doing: all Danish children’s names must be chosen from a list of approximately 7,000 approved baby names provided by the government. If you want to be a little wild and name your child something like Violet or Apple or Brooklyn, you have to apply for permission (and likely will be denied).

I found an interesting article in the New York Times discussing this facet of Danish cultural homogenization:

In Denmark, a country that embraces rules with the same gusto that Italy defies them, choosing a first and last name for a child is a serious, multitiered affair, governed by law and subject to the approval of the Ministry of Ecclesiastical Affairs and the Ministry of Family and Consumer Affairs.

At its heart, the Law on Personal Names is designed to protect Denmark's innocents - the children who are undeservedly, some would say cruelly, burdened by preposterous or silly names. It is the state's view that children should not suffer ridicule and abuse because of their parents' lapses in judgment or their misguided attempts to be hip. Denmark, like much of Scandinavia, prizes sameness, not uniqueness, just as it values usefulness, not frivolousness.

I think the good people behind Babies Named a Bad, Bad Thing would sympathize.

Happy Reformation Day!

Two years ago today, back when I would get up at 6:00AM voluntarily to run, I taped the crayon kiddie version of Luther's Ninety-Five Theses on the Power of Indulgences to the apartment door of our friends and neighbors, Phil and Rose.

This morning, I woke up to a little theological payback, blogger style. [drop to the comment]

Well Read Enough

I recently discovered that through the Danish library network I can request any book in any Danish library in the country be sent to my neighborhood library, and they have a wide selection of books in English (and Books in American). Since I have more free time on my hands I'm wanting to become better read. I've been looking for good top 100 lists of fiction and nonfiction books and have been a little ho-hum about the lists I've found.

So far there is the The Random House Modern Library list, the (Since 1923) TIME list, the Book magazine best fictional characters list, and the BBC Big Read.

I want to go with the BBC list because I've already knocked off 18 of the top 25 (it helps that five of those are Harry Potter books) but most of the books seem a little kiddie and I wouldn't expect to see The Princess Diaries in the list of modern classics I'm looking for. And I don't even recognize more than half of the titles from the TIME list. So I'm leaning Modern Library list. Unless you all, I'm sorry Y'ALL FOLK, have any other suggestions? Or a favorite from any of the lists?

Baby Einstein

I'm feeling a little less like a overly-concerned, psychotic parent for deciding with Michael not to let John watch television after running across this piece in the latest issue of TIME.

A few pertinent excerpts:

In the latest study on the effects of popular videos such as the "Baby Einstein" and "Brainy Baby" series, researchers find that these products may be doing more harm than good. And they may actually delay language development in toddlers. . .

The [University of Washington] research team found that with every hour per day spent watching baby DVDs and videos, infants learned six to eight fewer new vocabulary words than babies who never watched the videos. These products had the strongest detrimental effect on babies 8 to 16 months old, the age at which language skills are starting to form...

Last spring, Christakis and his colleagues found that by three months, 40% of babies are regular viewers of DVDs, videos or television; by the time they are two years old, almost 90% are spending two to three hours each day in front of a screen...

This growing evidence led the Academy to issue its recommendation in 1999 that no child under two years old watch any television...

Though the popular baby videos and DVDs in the Washington study were designed to stimulate infants' brains, not necessarily to promote language development, parents generally assume that the products' promises to make their babies smarter include improvement of speaking skills. But, says Christakis, "the majority of the videos don't try to promote language; they have rapid scene changes and quick edits, and no appearance of the 'parent-ese' type of speaking that parents use when talking to their babies..."

As far as Christakis and his colleagues can determine, the only thing that baby videos are doing is producing a generation of overstimulated kids. "There is an assumption that stimulation is good, so more is better," he says. "But that's not true; there is such a thing as overstimulation." His group has found that the more television children watch, the shorter their attention spans later in life. "Their minds come to expect a high level of stimulation, and view that as normal," says Christakis, "and by comparison, reality is boring."

I've always been a little weirded out by the whole Baby Einstein thing and had read just enough before John was born to think that television in generally is a bad idea for small children. Thus we made a conscious decision to not set him in front of a television or watch very much ourselves from the time he was little bitty. We did attempt to not make a big deal about it and it's been pretty easy even when we're visiting friends and family to keep John away from the tube. He rarely shows any interest even when he does have access anyway.

I'm definitely not trying to down people that use Baby Einstein or let their kids watch Dora. (Though I'd hope it's not for two to three hours everyday. I mean, wow.) I'm sure I haven't done the stay-at-home mom thing long enough to really appreciate the times when you just need you child to sit down and be still long enough for you to take a shower, make a meal or just mentally regroup. And I just have one and I'm sure the more you have, the more tempting it is to pop in the DVD and take a few precious minutes to breath through a paper bag.