Status

- Still on bed rest. It's still boring. I did get to go to Knitcetera tonight, which was awesome.
- I have completely given up on Tudor heaving bosoms. It turns out, I do not have the attention span for 44 minute TV dramas. (Alternative explanation: the show's just not that entertaining.) I need my reality shows broken up in chunks.
- Which is why I have crazy strong opinions about Top Chef: Las Vegas. My money, btw, is on Kevin for the win, and Jen and Mike V. for a cute hookup, and maybe a restaurant partnership. I would totally go to their restaurant. Or Bryan's. Or Kevin's. The fact that three of those people have to lose the show is a serious bummer.
- Danger Lad! has been insisting on his dignity lately. He is NOT a kid, he has completely rejected his daycare nickname, and also, he is NOT cute. Except that there's not much cuter than a toddler in denial about his cuteness. I have learned not to argue to his face. Here, however, I declare (E pur si muove!) that he's freakin' adorable.
- DL! is also obsessed with monsters. Fortunately, he doesn't seem to find them frightening. They are objects below him in the pecking order, and being entirely imaginary, they can be dominated. (In this, they are manifestly different from the cats, at least two of whom are theoretically beneath DL! in his personal ordering of the universe, but who nonetheless will not obey his commands.)

Books: "If Your Kid Eats This Book..."

After our last ER trip for Danger Lad!, we decided we needed reference material, and someone, somewhere (possibly NPR?) recommended If Your Kid Eats This Book, Everything Will Still Be Okay, and we have it now.

I think this is a much better reference for parents of newborns than it is for parents of toddlers. I already know, for example, that spit-up out the nose or shooting across the room is not an emergency. I know that a screaming child is a breathing child, that short falls are seldom harmful, that the baby should sleep on its back until it can flip itself over of its own volition. I don't need a book for that stuff anymore, but it might have been nice to have such a book back when I hadn't yet internalized the difference between a laundry problem and a health problem.

My major concern about the shortcomings of this book is that it doesn't spend as much time on injuries as I'd like. Toddlers are like little injury-generating machines. Thinking about it, however, if your kid is seriously injured, do you have time to flip through for the section on broken bones? Not so much. If you can recall that you read once that you can improvise a splint out of rolled up newspaper and some tape, that's as good as it's going to get.

If you have or are planning to have an infant, and don't mind seriously mainstream assumptions (the author assumes you had internal fetal monitoring during labor and that you're getting all vaccines), it's a good reference. This is a great book for people who have time to read about all the things that might happen to their babies and how they should cope. (In the newborn stage, I read The Happiest Baby on the Block from cover to cover, and it had far less informational content than this.) If you have a toddler and don't know some basic first aid already, take a class, and also, program the number for poison control into your phone, but you're already past most of the material here, and if you have to stop and look up what to do for profuse bleeding, you're going to wind up using the book to apply direct pressure when a paper napkin or the remains of your t-shirt would be a better choice.