Babies without diapers. (Getty Images)

The New York Times has a very good, very important story today about parents who don't diaper their children and let them urinate/defecate wherever they want because of the environment, but also because it allows one to be in touch their child's "elimination communications." We're trying to refrain from judgement, but shouldn't parents be doing the communicating about where its appropriate to go pee-pee, since they know language and don't have a soft spot on their skull?

This item was full of gems, most notably the ending:

Still, even the most ardent practitioners observe some limits. “I don’t think you can walk down Fifth Avenue and just let your baby poop on the sidewalk," [some lady] said.

This essay has caused a veritable--excuse our punnery--shitstorm on the web that the Times' commenting section alone is worth the read. Here are just a choice few of our favorites.


Linda raises a very good point: most college students don't know how to use a toilet despite early training.

There's nothing like White Knighting the parent whose toddler is defecating outside Saks.

We love you, Alan.

No one was asking you over for supper, lady. But you're right...gross.

Ha, you should meet our friend, Alan. You guys would get along.

Truer words, etc.,

Via Twitter

Are you guys ready to read tweets from  Rep. Steve "The most conservative Congressman in Texas! 100% lifetime NRA, GOA, NAGR, Right to Life rating. Offended? Yell at @DonnyFerguson" Stockman?

Are you??! Because fair warning, he's got himself a new bumper sticker idea, and it definitely includes some nonsensical sloganeering about abortion, babies and guns.

So...you ready for it?

What does this even mean? Or, what does this statement mean to you? Because the best reading we've come up with is: "If fetuses had guns, no mother would have a chance to even try to carry it to the first trimester--let alone abort it--before it accidentally knocked off the safety and blasted itself out of utero."

Which would be...a...bad thing? No? So this is definitely a pro-fetal guns message? Really? Is that what this is?

Incredible. Happy Friday, everyone. Pick these up on your way out of the DMV and don't forget to buckle up, T.G.I.F.

Illo by Thomas Pitilli.

Sleeping through the night doesn’t seem like such a hard task. Not to brag, but I used to do it all the time. One minute I would be struggling to decode a Will Shortz pun, the next minute: Sunlight! Garbage trucks! Some asshole honking! A new day dawned.

My son, Sam, however, does not seem to have gotten the memo. Not only does he not sleep through the night, he is almost no help at all with the Times crossword. Unless the clue is “One who can’t be pacified,” say.

It’s funny how much sleep obsesses new parents.

All we ever want to know is who’s getting it, how often, and how deep. How long does it last, we ask breathlessly over cocktails. Twenty minutes? Three hours? Six? Sleep has become to our 30s what sex was to our 20s: We still talk about it much more often than we do it, and our roommates present a considerable obstacle.

The first question my husband and I had to answer as new parents was: Where will the baby sleep? We got something called an Arm’s Reach Co-Sleeper, which is like a mini-crib designed to attach to the side of an adult bed. But our baby did not like the co-sleeper, perhaps because its “mattress” was essentially a sheet of corrugated cardboard (for safety reasons, babies are only allowed to sleep on surfaces that cannot possibly suffocate them, such as parquet flooring and chain-link fences). The average prison cot is cozier than a crib mattress, but babies must endure, swaddled in their cute little straightjackets meant to approximate the uterine wall’s viselike embrace.

When the co-sleeper didn’t work, we started putting our son in a cheerful yellow bassinet that we dragged with us from room to room. But he didn’t like that either, and getting him to doze in it required first rocking him to sleep on our bodies and then transferring him into the new vessel, a task we approached with the anxious care of two people playing Jenga with sticks of dynamite.

Now he sleeps in our bed most of the time. Even if you’re not a hippie, “family bed” sounds cozy, right? Big Love by way of Sesame Street? Wrong. I get kicked in the face, my husband sleeps at the foot of the bed like a Labrador, and Sam’s hair bears the unmistakable scent of armpit. It smells like defeat.

People kept telling us he would sleep better at six weeks. Or 10 pounds. Whichever came first. When he started eating solids, or sleeping on his stomach. People told us to follow the “Five S’s,” a mnemonic made famous by Harvey Karp, a bestselling author and Dr. Phil staple known as “the baby whisperer.” But I still can’t remember what the S’s stand for, as in our house they devolved quickly into “Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit!” Our baby would not sleep—at least, not well. Night after night, I imagined what Sisyphus must have felt like, had he been pushing a Bugaboo instead of a boulder. Or if the boulder had been screaming. Or if his punishment had included listening to Led Zeppelin songs played on the glockenspiel.

“Oh, getting him to sleep is really simple,” our pediatrician told us when we saw her for Sam’s three-month visit. We leaned in like junkies eager for a fix. “You just put him in the crib, close the door, and don’t go in until the next morning.” Readers who are parents will notice that there’s a crucial ellipsis hidden in her advice. Let’s revisit: You just put him in the crib (seems easy enough), close the door (hand-eye coordination challenge, but O.K.) ... baby cries for forty-fucking-five minutes while you weep into your vodka (there’s the rub!) ... and don’t go in until the next morning. Full disclosure: I only know about this ellipsis through the experience of friends. I was unwilling to let him cry. The one time we tried it, just for a few minutes, he gagged on his own wracking sobs and projectile-vomited. Back to the wakeful family bed we went.

There are countless books and patented methods out there promising to get babies to sleep through the night, but most people opt for one of two: some variation on the “cry-it-out” approach (see above re: tears and booze) or total denial and avoidance, and the hope that the baby will start sleeping like a second-semester college senior without parental intervention.

Cry-it-out, of course, like all parenting choices these days, is divisive. Lots of people swear by it, trading a few nights of misery for a lifetime of peaceful slumber, but attachment parents demonize it as emotionally harmful to children, citing articles by psychologists who argue that babies stop crying and fall into deep sleep not because they learn to self-soothe but because they become despondent and apathetic, convinced that they’ve been abandoned. These studies always claim that babies left to cry carry emotional problems with them throughout their lives.

On the flip side, a lot of people assume that by letting Sam sleep next to me and comforting him whenever he stirs will turn him into some kind of cross between Oedipus and Norman Bates. But I don’t buy any of it, just like I can’t really accept astrology’s dubious claim that all people born under the one sign can be described with the same set of adjectives. (Then again, I’m an Aries.)

We’ve had our victories, however small, like the two instances during which Sam slept for eight hours in his own crib immediately after we watched Ryan Gosling movies on Netflix. It seemed like a harbinger of happy slumber, but then Blue Valentine broke our streak. I think he found it too depressing. Maybe we’ll have better luck with The Notebook.

editorial@observer.com

The general consensus was that no one was having much sex, and no one wanted to, either. Many of the mothers said they could count the number of times they’d had sex postpartum on one hand, and some had 8- and 9-month-old babies. When I came home and reported these stats to my husband, he was elated. We manage to have sex about once a week, which is the new-parent equivalent of constantly.
Not that it’s been easy. No one tells you this, but babies are the world’s biggest cockblock.

The first few times we attempted to rekindle the romance, our son—perhaps sensing the potential biological threat of additional offspring—refused to cooperate. Time after time, we attempted to put him down in his bassinet, only to hear him squeal moments later as we prepared to doff our spit-up-stained sweatpants. Once we finally succeeded, it was a hurried affair, and not as enjoyable for me as I would have liked—not because of any failure on the part of my husband, but because it was impossible for me not to worry that my equipment had been ... well, compromised.

The problem is, once you’ve pushed a baby through an orifice you once reserved for recreational purposes, it’s hard to go back, psychologically speaking. That’s not always a bad thing—I recently needed encouragement to finish a stressful project on deadline, and a friend put her hand on mine and told me, with some very meaningful eye contact, “You gave birth. You can do anything”—but when you’re in the throes of passion and suddenly you find yourself thinking, “A head came out of there!” it kind of puts a damper on the proceedings. I remember my 10th-grade health teacher, Ms. Drvostep, gravely informing the class during a discussion of human sexuality that, at least biologically, the anus was designed as an “out hole.” Maybe that’s my problem. My vagina was an in hole, then it was (briefly, but memorably) an out hole, and now it’s supposed to be an in hole again. It’s having an identity crisis, and it doesn’t help that sometimes, when I’m drying off after a shower, my husband will point at my crotch and exclaim gleefully to our child, “There’s your old house!”

There is also the uncomfortable (double entendre intended) truth that it’s hard to go back, physiologically speaking, even if your doctor gives you the go-ahead after six weeks, which is the standard abstinence period gratefully celebrated by the new mom and ascetically endured by the new dad (the wait time is even longer following caesarean sections). No matter how many kegels—pelvic exercises akin to vaginal bicep curls, for the uninitiated—you do, the fact remains that a fully formed human being weighing around eight pounds came out of an opening previously accustomed to visitors of a smaller girth.

An old Lenny Bruce routine once compared a large penis to a baby’s arm, but add a second arm, two legs, a torso and a head that feels, from the inside, like a bowling ball set on fire, and you have something not at all like a penis. So naturally there is going to be some fallout (no pun intended! none!) from the stretching. No one wants to talk about it, of course. I mean, I’m always seeing tabloid covers crowing about some celebrity or other’s post-baby body, which they presumably achieve through a combination of colonic therapy, macrobiotic diet and virgin sacrifice. But I never see an article about, say, Jessica Alba’s post-baby vagina. And if hers isn’t ready for the pages of Us Weekly, then what hope is there for the rest of us?

It’s a slippery slope even under the best of circumstances, and I’m not speaking literally, as anyone who’s experienced the drying effects of plummeting postpartum estrogen can attest. Even if you do get over the libido-robbing hormone fiesta and the colicky coitus interuptus and manage to retain enviable nether regional muscle tone and semi-regular bedpost-notching, there’s one thing that no amount of personal grooming or mood music can change, and that’s the realization that you’re now somebody’s mother. As such, society now gives you two exciting choices, a special procreative variation on the traditional madonna/whore: either succumb to the high-waisted jeans, sensible earlobe-length haircut, and soccer-friendly SUV of the asexual martyr who lives in a Tide commercial, or get a gym membership, hop on the treadmill, and run like hell for MILF Island. (To be clear, not a real place, although I hear East Hampton is getting close.)

The term MILF itself points up the problem. I’ve always disliked it, and not just because it’s icky and sophomoric, but because it suggests that a mother who’s considered sexually desirable is an endangered species on a par with the Tasmanian Devil or the Giant Panda. I like to think I am at least as sexy as a regular-size panda, on days I’ve managed to shower.

Despite all of the awkwardness and body dysmorphia outlined above, however, I’m happy to report that I still very much enjoy sex when conditions are ideal (baby, asleep; me, awake), and that despite what my sense memory occasionally tells me, no part of my anatomy resembles the Holland Tunnel, even in passing. Post-baby sex can even feel sometimes like the carefree sex of my youth, except that it’s faster and more exhausted—not to be confused with exhaustive—and we can’t make any noise for fear of scarring our sleeping child for life. And we never even consider not using protection in the heat of the moment, because, seriously, look where that got us.

But otherwise, it’s good. Plus there’s the added bonus that I might find a stray Cheerio in my bra. Kinky.
editorial@observer.com

This was in 2009. My husband, Jeff, and I were on our way to Berlin, and a toddler a few rows ahead of us was voicing dissatisfaction with his sudden corporeal confinement by making the sorts of noises Janis Joplin might have produced had she lived to accidentally stick her hand into a garbage disposal.

I rolled my eyes and returned to my US Weekly and Delta-issue merlot. “I know. What an asshole.”

John Lennon once sang of instant karma. But in my case, it took three years.

My friend Aileen, who is Filipina, got engaged while I was pregnant. When she announced that the wedding—to an outdoorsy Minnesotan she met at business school—would take place in her homeland, the terror of such a trip avec bébe did not immediately dawn on me. When we bought our tickets, of course, the baby was infinitely portable. The only accoutrements he required were a strip of black elastic that served as a table leaf for the waistband of my jeans and a thick roll of Tums.

But then he was out, squirmy and squalling and requiring approximately twice as many accessories—and even more diapers—than the Kardashian sisters go through during a weekend trip to Vegas. And we were headed to an archipelago almost 9,000 miles and 28 hours of travel from Manhattan, which is like the MTA equivalent of hopping on a weekend subway shuttle bus to Baton Rouge. The 16-hour flight to Hong Kong (followed by another, three-hour flight and a two-hour ferry ride) seemed less like a madcap National Lampoon-esque adventure and closer to a total fucking nightmare.

He could cry nonstop, a fate worse than an in-flight movie menu limited to Ace Ventura 2: When Nature Calls and Grumpier Old Men, which I actually experienced in 1996. He might shit uncontrollably (as of boarding time it had been three days, which I feared might land him on the no-fly list as an explosive). Fellow passengers might whisper obscenities about my child. In two languages!

“Don’t worry,” my friend Angie (who is Chinese) told me a few days before the trip. “There will be Asian babies on the plane, and Asian babies are the worst.”

I was confused. Everything I know about Asian children, I learned from Amy Chua. Wouldn’t they be too busy practicing Ravel’s Gaspard de la Nuit on the xylophone to fuss?

“Oh no,” Angie assured me. “Asian babies are spoiled. They’ll make yours look good by comparison.”

As it turned out, there were a number of crying Chinese babies on our planes, all of whom seemed strategically clustered around a tetchy middle-aged British woman who was slowly and visibly losing her mind. And Angie was right; our portly American infant was generally unmoved by the change in scenery and air pressure. He divided his time between eating, napping, and balancing precariously on a pad atop the junior-sized toilet as I frantically applied my limited grasp of 10th grade physics to the task of changing his diaper without actually touching anything. Tiger Mothers may get standardized test results, but Sloth Babies allow for uninterrupted in-flight viewing of Downton Abbey’s second season. So, apples and oranges, really.

The flight, it turned out, was relatively easy. Feeling at ease, approximately twenty minutes after we arrived on the island of Panglao—hair buoyed by the humidity and spirits buoyed by the $2 margaritas at the hotel bar—I decided to take a walk.

It was at this point I began to feel as if I were trying to kill my son.

We’d schlepped the stroller all the way from JFK with the New Yorker’s naive expectation that sidewalks are a universal law instead of a regional whimsy. But steering around a stream of stop light-free traffic that might best be described as “clusterfuckish” made me feel like I was playing a live version of Frogger while pushing a wheelbarrow.

Just as I started to feel like a truly deficient caretaker, a motorcycle whizzed past bearing an entire family of four, the smallest child—who couldn’t have been more than two—essentially streaming behind the bike like a windsock.

Aileen had warned me that parenting in the Philippines was much less neurotic than it is in the U.S., but still, it wasn’t easy to adjust to a country so free of fear. “I don’t think we have car seats,” she said confusedly when I asked how I was supposed to transport my baby in accordance with the latest safety laws. Back in Brooklyn, I’m a negligent mother for placing a blanket over my son while he sleeps (in January!); in Panglao, I’m smiled at while leaning out the side of a tuk tuk—a three-wheeled motorcycle rickshaw—going 25 mph with Sam strapped to my chest. “Hello beh-beh!” the women called out, waving.

By week’s end, I was with the relaxed Filipino program, and I’d engaged in at least three additional behaviors that would have given my fellow Park Slope parents grand mal seizures: riding seatbelt-less in an over-capacity standing-room-only bus; peering over the edge of a sheer rock cliff; brushing my teeth with tap water.

But alas, one had to return to the Elysian Fields of the Slope, where a battle was raging on the message boards about whether to ban ice cream vendors from the playground. Perhaps feeling the neurotic vibes tightening around him—or perhaps as penance for his parents’ sin of traveling halfway around the globe and absorbing little more than watermelon mojitos, the ensuing jet lag did turn the baby into a dick.

editorial@observer.com

(image via Guardian)

Former News International executive Rebekah Brooks and her former racehorse trainer husband announced the arrival of their daughter, Scarlett Anne Mary Brooks, at a private hospital in London today, reports the Independent.

Ms. Brooks was arrested in Scotland Yard's phone hacking and police corruption investigations two days after she resigned from News Corp.'s European newspaper group. She is currently out on bail and maintains her innocence.

Sadly, Ms. Brooks was not ingeniously hiding a pregnancy this whole time. The couple used a surrogate.

It's a party of three!

Add another RSVP to the great guest list of life -- a newly minted nightlife power couple will soon be a family of three.

Party blog doyenne Rachelle Hruska and her new husband, hotelier Sean MacPherson, are welcoming a new member this December, Ms. Hruska confirmed to The Observer.

"We’re very excited!" she said over the phone. "We’re going to have a new Guest of a Guest baby."

The future mother and her husband, the impresario responsible for The Jane Hotel and a swath of other hotspots in Meatpacking and Chelsea, were married on Montauk earlier this summer.

The baby will come just after Ms. Hruska and her company launch Guest of a Guest Global, a new venture that will expand the site's coverage and purview to other continents.

"We’re gonna start covering people and parties in places around the world –- Cannes, Art Basel Switzerland, Paris Fashion Week, and the Oscars," she said.

The expansion will go live sometime this Fall.

To celebrate, Guest of a Guest is throwing a bash this Wednesday at the Cabanas at the Maritime Hotel, the venue Mr. MacPherson famously refurbished in the early 00s. And if you can't make it, we're pretty sure a certain website will have the complete coverage the following morning.

W

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

"If you look at child-friendly parts of Brooklyn -- Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn Heights, Park Slope -- those neighborhoods are beautiful and safe and the schools are great and that is good for our kids," (Michael) Moshan (a resident) said. "But is that good for us? We thought, if Williamsburg could mature into a neighborhood where kids can grow, then you've won."

Families are discovering that Williamsburg is much more than a playground for the postcollege, skinny-jeans set. The neighborhood has a few private preschools; several indoor play spaces; art, movement and music classes; and a number of children's stores, some of which were started by neighborhood parents. Many of the condo buildings rising all over the neighborhood feature playrooms, pools and other family-friendly amenities.

Even the Slope's babies-in-bars craze has come to the Burg.

The popularity shows in the numbers, too. A wide-eyed Journal article about the neighborhood's ascent points out that housing prices have risen 2.4 percent over the past three years--and a striking 30 percent in neighboring Greenpoint--while they have dropped 14 percent citywide over the same period. Even with the ugly, un-brownstone buildings, Williamsburg is hot, hot, hot.

Need more proof?

Artists continue to be harrassed out of the neighborhood by greedy landlords, and those who remain have gone crazy.

Consider the case of Michael and Hazel Fiore, a couple in their 50s who lived in a third-floor loft on Metropolitan Avenue, one of Williamsburg's main throroughfares. The Post reports that they are the first people to be indicted under a 2006 state law forbidding animal "hoarding." More than 100 cats were found in their apartment, a discovery that came after five of them fell through the rotting floorboards.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @mc_nyo

So it's refreshing to know that New York's elite toddlers all lay claim to odd monikers, thanks to their attention-hungry parents. New York's Daily Intel produced a "10 Under 10" list (not quite as essential as The New Yorker's "20 Under 40," but, hey, we'll take it) and most of today's scions of fame will grow up constantly defending themselves in elementary school getting-to-know-you games. 

Who made the cut? There's Romy Mars, daughter of hotel-obsessed auteur Sofia Coppola and Phoenix lead singer Thomas Mars, whose voice was stuck in your head for all of 2009. And Tabitha Hodge and Marion Loretta Elwell Broderick, the twin offspring of Carrie Bradshaw and Ferris Beuller. Bjork daughter Ísadóra Bjarkardóttir Barney would have been weird if her name were "Jane," so we'll let that one slide. And then there's Secret Midnight Magic Nico Snow, who we're particularly excited for. Here's what Daily Intel predicts for this one.

The daughter of deceased artist Dash Snow and French aristocrat Jade Berreau will likely grow up among a rotating cast of beautiful bohemians, bedazzled in on-loan Van Cleef & Arpel. After a brief stint at the Professional Children’s School, she'll ditch the city and head off into sunset on the back of a motorcycle (boyfriends will forever look like Dad). But don’t worry, if things get too crazy, great-aunt Uma Thurman can always bail her out.

Our one rule for Secret Snow: No Hamster's Nest parties until you're at least 13!

nfreeman at observer.com |@nfreeman1234

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