The importance of friends & family in your baby's life

So I'm typing in a comment responding to a query from a gal about her tiny baby being very attached to her and how she can get ready for when she goes back to work, saying "get her used to friends and family holding her and being safe too" when it struck me how poor a job of this Linda and I did with our kids and how that really adversely affected our ability to have a life of our own when they were little.

What's ironic is that we did exactly the same thing with our beloved dogs too. We got two standard poodles, Jasmine and Karma (well, their breeder names were Dal Cristi's Crescent Moon and Dal Cristi's Kona Moon, but we simplified things!) when they were 8 weeks old and we were in grad school, with weird schedules. So what did we do? We never socialized them, they just hung out with us and occasionally met a friend who would come over to our places (we were living in two apartments in the same complex when we got them) to study.

Whenever we'd take them out for a walk (the dogs, not our babies!! :-) they'd bark at everyone and be fearful of anything that was at all abnormal. I can still remember how of an evening Karma would slink in terror past trash cans if it was trash day in our neighborhood. Amusing at the time, but indicative of a lack of self-confidence that did rear its head time and again as she grew older with us and wouldn't stop barking at people.

What strikes me is that in both situations, with kids and with dogs, we were so easily lulled into our own little world that we forgot that being insular isn't safer, it's a serious problem for babies and puppies alike.

I've shared with many of my friends how my oldest, A-, 13, had such major separation anxiety that the first year we had her in pre-school (a parent co-op pre-school) I spent every single morning on campus for the entire year because she'd flip out if I left.

It started out where I'd have to be in the same space or visible, but then I'd just grab the Wall Street Journal, a couple of magazines, and hang out in an unused classroom, relaxing and reading, while she'd peek in every 10-15 minutes to make sure that her defender, her Dad, was within range and she was therefore safe, even if she couldn't see me at the moment.

Finally, by the end of the year, I could say "I'm going to get a cup of coffee, I'll be back in ten minutes" and then pop over to Los Osos Cafe down the street in Los Gatos proper, get a cup of coffee and hang out in my car in the parking lot, reading and listening to NPR.

Wacked. It was in retrospect insane to do that for a year, but it was the only way at that point we could teach her to have the confidence that school was safe, that teachers were safe, and that it was okay to not be within arm's reach of mommy or daddy every waking moment. I won't even share our babysitter horror stories, but let's just say we learned fairly quickly that even our friends couldn't babysit when she was young.

It worked out in the end, as they say, but looking back on it, we did the same darn thing that we'd done with our dogs: had too few strangers, too few family members, too few friends involved in their lives, and we reaped the inevitable consequences of that with fearful children who had / have a hard time with strangers.

Is it still an issue? Two nights ago a babysitter - a family friend whose younger sister is A-'s classmate - stayed with my kids while I attended a meeting and when I asked for a report afterwards, K-, 6, had a hard time going to bed and was quite upset around bedtime. At six. With her older brother and sister in the house too.

When I asked her why she'd had a hard time with bedtime she told me that it was because she and her brother had been arguing and that had upset her, but I think it was just bedtime. We have a nice rhythm, a nice bedtime routine at my house, her and I cuddling up, reading a book, and her drifting quickly off to sleep, and we do that every night she's here at my place without fail.

So is a routine good or is it bad? Jeez, at this point I don't even know. I will say that I feel like it's amazing that 13 years into parenting I still don't have the whole "other people in their lives" thing worked out so that I have more freedom. Sometimes I feel like that's the dark unspoken side of attachment parenting, actually, and other times I think that it's lucky for my sanity that I'm now divorced: half the time I have no kids and freedom to have a social life without worrying about the home bedtime scene.

Still, how are you dealing with the balance between attachment parenting, closeness, trust in strangers/family, and your children's ability to be successful away from you?

Review: fun, huge building blocks: Brik-a-Blok

A rather surprising email arrived in my inbox a few weeks ago from a PR company that represented a toy inventor in Québec, Brik-a-Blok Toys. Seems they have a sort of human-size Lego set and were interested if I'd like to have a look. Here's a pic from their site:

Looked pretty cool and my 6yo girl is always pushing things around to make forts and hideouts, so I answered their query "sure!" and dutifully received a really big, heavy box from UPS a week or so later...

What I didn't expect was that not only would my girl enjoy it, but my 9yo son looked at it and rather than saying "uh, whatever" responded "cool!" and immediately started building and crawling around in it. He's bigger than she is, of course, so those turns were hard for him to negotiate (which of course makes me even more suspicious of the Hollywood action film trope of people wiggling through air conditioning ducts. In fact, I think that'd be pretty darn hard! But that's another story...).

I let them have free reign in our pretty small townhouse and it didn't take long to realize the greatest limitation with the Brik-a-Block toys: you really need a lot of space to enjoy them.

As you can see in this picture, they took over the kitchen and laundry room in short order, even with the 2x2x2 room they built at the end of the tunnel:

When their first question is "can we get more of these, Daddy?" I know it's a hit.

What I wish they had, though, were some 'window' panels or different pieces that can work as doors. With every single piece edged with hinge elements, any sort of "hole" tended to affect the stability of the assembly. Now, to be fair, they do include little plastic stabilizing clips too, but my kids were more into building - fast - than in building rigid and stable.

Oh, and our cat found the entire experience fascinating and he's still trying to figure out why we now have tunnels in our house, tunnels plenty of big enough for him to hide in and still keep a beady little eye on what's happening in the house.

Now the down side: we were sent a 46-panel system to review. Nice, but I didn't realize that they're a rather hefty $179.99 plus shipping. That's an expensive building toy and the chances of me buying a second set so my kids can expand their constructions? Not too likely at that price point.

Is it overpriced? I don't think so, but I do think that the price (almost $4/panel) is going to limit the Brik-a-Blok system to affluent parents and higher end kindergartens and preschools. Don't know if it's the fact that they don't have large-scale production facilities yet, but if there was a way to drop the price in half I think they'd have a big winner on their hands.

For now, if you have the money, the space and kids that like building, this is a pretty fabulously cool toy for 'em.

Learn more: BrikaBlok.com.

Looking for an über-chic hotel in San Diego?

I was in San Diego a week or two ago and rather than just check out Expedia to find a place to stay I contacted a friend at Bailey * Gardiner who arranged for me to get a journalist rate at the Sé San Diego, downtown in the center of urban San Diego, California.

Just as well, too, as even with the special room rate, it cost me over $150 for a single night's stay. The normal rate would double the tab, but you know what? It was totally worth it and was probably the very nicest place I've ever stayed on my travels.

Continue reading Looking for an über-chic hotel in San Diego?

Weird Pic Caption Contest

I hosted a panel last night on the future of television, for the DaVinci Institute, and as part of it, I continued an amusing tradition of presenting the weirdest pictures of the week and offered up what I hope were amusing captions for them unrelated to the original context of the pictures.

Seems to me that'd be fun to do here on my blog to, so without further ado, here they are...

The first one is easy, and I'll use it as a demonstration of what I mean:

(1) Larry was determined to do anything to avoid being the black sheep of the family.

Now, what's your best caption?

Read on for more...

Continue reading Weird Pic Caption Contest

Research: Why your match.com email doesn't lead to dates

I know I'm a research geek with lots of academic background and even a stint as a research scientist at an R&D lab, but still, this kind of data really fascinates me to no end: Online dating site OK Cupid has released the result of some semantic analysis that it did of the aggregate emails that people on the site sent each other, comparing what they wrote against whether or not they actually went on a date with the other person.

Now anyone with a research background will immediately glom onto the fact that they have committed the cardinal sin of assuming causality from correlational data, but it's so darn interesting that I'll let it slide anyway :-) In a nutshell, the problem can be explained thusly: poor people have above-ground pools, while rich people have in-ground pools, therefore getting an in-ground pool must make you rich." See the problem?

Anyway, we're not interested in pools or money, we're interested in picking up that sexy possibility on an online dating service like Match or eHarmony or... etc. That's what they looked at, and if we can even just look at the correlational data and if we can make the assumption that the people that use OK Cupid are sufficiently similar to those that use the more mainstream sites, well, let's look at what they found...

Continue reading Research: Why your match.com email doesn't lead to dates

The Story Behind Cirque du Soleil's The Beatles LOVE

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you know that I write about all sorts of stuff, not just parenting (though as a single dad with three kids parenting is pretty much always on my mind!), including some of the shows that I have a chance to see as I travel around. About a year ago I got to see Cirque du Soleil's The Beatles LOVE, and wrote an extensive review on this blog [see Review of Cirque du Soleil's The Beatles: LOVE].

I was back in Las Vegas a few weeks ago for the Consumer Electronics Show, and my friend Jessica who works at Cirque sent me tickets to see The Beatles LOVE again, and it was just as wonderful and entertaining as last time, if not more so since I had more of a sense of what was going on.

This time, though, I paid attention to what on my film blog I'd call the "story arc", the order in which scenes and acts were shown on stage. Given the backstory of the Fab Four, it was considerably more insightful and thoughtful than I expected...

Continue reading The Story Behind Cirque du Soleil's The Beatles LOVE

Finding your sex appeal after divorce

This amusing piece was sent to me by the gal who wrote the book The Laptop Dancer Diaries and I thought I'd share it, even though it's a bit, um, explicit. It's written from a woman's perspective, but with a few tweaks I think it addresses universal issues of self-image and self-confidence post-divorce. Read on, but you've been warned. Oh, and it's okay to laugh a few times, even if it's in embarrassment. :-)

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You're a woman in your forties. You've been through enough of life's experiences that nothing can faze you. You've developed confidence and style. You are no longer self-conscious about what you say or how you look and you like who you've become, wrinkles and all. Those laugh lines add character.

Then you get divorced. Suddenly, you feel about as secure as a high school geek with braces and acne. Childbirth and age have left you with cellulite, stretch marks, and deflated boobs. How in the world will you ever feel comfortable exposing your naked body to a new man? You decide it's time to experiment with vibrators.

Although vibrators provide surprisingly more satisfaction than your ex-husband ever did, eventually, you come to the conclusion that they do not provide the emotional connection that you crave. Admittedly, most men come up short in that department, too, but you are not quite ready to experiment with women. You know you must venture out into that scary world of dating.

Continue reading Finding your sex appeal after divorce

Should your ex show up at events when it's your time?

Since I post questions for other people with some anonymity involved, I am finding that more questions are showing up in my mailbox, asking me for advice. I'm happy to help, but I do have to be candid that I'm hardly an expert parent nor am I any sort of expert on attachment parenting.

Nonetheless, here's the question of the day:

Dave, I'm struggling with a co-parenting issue and looking for a fellow attachment parent to run a couple things by...like hockey tournament in Colorado Springs during my weekend in Feb. and he wants to come and get his own room. Not really my cup of tea. So, what is in the best interest of my son and MY best interest feel competing. Then again, the 30 minute hockey tournament 2 mornings during the weekend is really cute but not worth driving to the Springs with girl du jour. Motivation unclear, in my opinion.

I know that my first reaction was "screw your ex, it's your time, he and his gal should stay the heck away!", but then I kept thinking about the situation, took a breath, and realized that my first reaction was exactly wrong.

Continue reading Should your ex show up at events when it's your time?

Honey, it's our fetus on the phone again!

I am just so entertained by this phenomenally wacky hardware add-on to our handy Apple iPhones: the Ritmo Advanced Pregnancy Sound System, which, according to its makers, "was created to provide a convenient, comfortable and safe way for families to share the sensory and emotional experience of bonding through sound and music with their developing baby."

Marketing talk, for sure, but the basic concept is just hilarious: it's a sort of two piece belt that mama wears around her belly that plugs in to an iPhone or other audio device. As the headline says: Talk to your baby in the womb using an iPhone. Wow!

On the left I have an actual product picture from the Ritmo site, and I've also embedded a video. Every time I look at the photo on the right, I think "darn that little monkey, calling me again!"

Now, in reality, I realize that the fetus can't actually initiate calls (not yet, that might be v2 of the Ritmo product for all we know), but jeez, isn't this just a little bit over the top?

Continue reading Honey, it's our fetus on the phone again!

Avoiding stress while raising two 4mo boys?

As is not uncommon, I received an email from someone who earnestly hoped that I was an expert on attachment parenting. I'm not. I just play one on TV. Oh, no, I turned that offer down (it's true, I was invited to come on the Dr. Phil show to talk about attachment parenting!).

More seriously, I've just been using an attachment parenting approach first with my children when they were young, and now as best I can as a single dad who has my kids approximately 50% of the time. It's not easy, though Linda and I are at least in pretty close sync about what we are and aren't okay with from a parenting perspective.

Anyway, back to the email I received. Here's what the gal asked:

"I am new to the whole Attachment Parenting thing and I came across your blog when I googled AP. I am reading Naomi Aldort's book Raising Our Children, Raising Ourselves. I agree with most of everything I have learned so far, but I am already kind of stressing myself out which in turn is going to stress my boys out, which defeats the whole point.

My problem is I have four-month-old twin boys. I read the other day that if you leave your baby crying it will increase the cortisol in the baby's brain and could cause problems later in life. Now when I'm feeding one baby and he other baby goes off I feel bad if I can't get to him right away. I have trouble trying to carry them both at the same time?? I tried a Moby wrap but that didn't work to well. Right now I take turns carry them each in the sling at different times.

I still have a lot to learn about AP and I'm trying to take a deep breath and relax and do the best I can. Do you have any ideas about how I can do AP type things with both the boys???"

My response is...

Continue reading Avoiding stress while raising two 4mo boys?

How do you refer to "the person you're seeing" when you're an adult?

As a single man again, after almost two decades of being in a relationship, I'm finding that dating in my 40s is very different from dating in my 20s. One huge difference in me is self-confidence: I'm far more self-assured than I ever was back then.

Just as importantly, I know what I don't like and am comfortable saying so. Want to go ski the black diamond slopes in Aspen? I'm not your man. Want to go sky-diving? I'll see you on the ground and good luck to you! Going to see a movie? Going for a hike? Need a pal at a local rep theater production? Having a spontaneous weekend somewhere? Now we're talking...

But here's what's baffling me: if I'm seeing someone, if we've been dating for long enough that we've reprogrammed our phones to have each other on speed dial (I know, quite trés modern, eh?), what's the word we should be using to describe each other?

Continue reading How do you refer to "the person you're seeing" when you're an adult?

Reality TV Show Casting Call!

Generally I am not a big fan of reality shows as I know from the inside that they're manipulated and designed to create drama and interest rather than the actual boring humdrum reality of our day to day, minute by minute lives, but sometimes things do come along that are a bit different.

This casting call, from an LA-based freelance casting associate, does sound kind of interesting, with its emphasis on " America's most outgoing families to compete in exciting outdoor challenges". Is it going to be of reasonable quality? It'll take a year for us to find out, I imagine, but if your family is picked, you do get $5000 compensation, plus I presume gear, visibility, lodging, food, and perhaps some nice trips too.

Check it out: and if you do apply, please leave a comment letting us know how it went!

Continue reading Reality TV Show Casting Call!

Sleepovers: our place or theirs?

Had an interesting experience last weekend with my 13yo daughter, A-. All day she'd been talking about having her pal over to our place for a sleepover, and her friend had joined us for the day's activities (she's a delightful addition to the family and always welcome).

Late afternoon we talked about how we were one bed mattress short for things to work: We have three mattresses and one air mattress but adding her would make five and unless the girls were willing to share A-'s (big) bed, we needed to get an additional bed.

That's what they wanted, no problem, so we stopped by Linen's Etc and I spent $200 buying a new aerobed + two anti-allergenic blankets on 50% off sale (we needed more blankets anyway) along with a hot air popper.

On the way home, A- asks "can we watch a movie tonight, Daddy?" to which I said "no, that's not going to work out."

She was clearly not too happy with that answer and after a moment's thought...

Continue reading Sleepovers: our place or theirs?

Attachment parenting and babysitters

I don't know exactly how we ended up in this situation, but I find that one of the toughest things about being a single parent with three varied age kids we've raised with attachment parenting ideals is that they're not babysitter friendly.

What do I mean by that? Simply that they aren't responsive to babysitters, don't listen, and generally are anxious and upset if they're with someone other than Linda or I. Not during the day, I'll note, but I'm talking evenings, bed time.

As I have written before over the years that I've run this blog, bedtime has been a perpetual challenge and frankly it seems like bedtime problems are a great unspoken problem for parents in our society, particularly those of us that are trying to create a "safe container" for our children. (do I sound like I live in Boulder, Colorado, or what?)

Continue reading Attachment parenting and babysitters

Fighting H1N1 with a cool soap dispenser

I'm not a big fan of vaccinations. I think that it's one of the reasons that we're seeing more and more extreme allergies and auto-immune deficiency illnesses, a path that only seems to have one direction for us to travel: to a world where people are more and more sickly, more reliant on the vaccinations and big pharma medications.

Probably makes me sound a bit paranoid. Ah well, can't be helped, I'm just being transparent. My kids have never been vaccinated for anything and they've had remarkably healthy childhoods and when they've gotten sick, they're returned to health quite quickly. Correlative? I don't think so, personally.

Anyway, the "plague" of H1N1 aka swine flu raises an interesting question: should I get my children vaccinated from this flu strain?

No surprise, Linda and I decided not to have the vaccination, either for ourselves or for the kids. (at least, I assume she hasn't had the vaccination. I know I haven't been vaccinated)

But what to do instead?

Continue reading Fighting H1N1 with a cool soap dispenser

Dad + daughter's hair: an inherent disaster?

I'm lucky, I know. I'm a single dad to two girls, 12 and 5, and while it'd be a bit odd for the tween to be asking me for help with the latest hair style, it's a miracle that my 5yo daughter can do her own hair and never asks me for more than finding those darn hair bands.

Most dads don't have it that easy, and there's little more intimidating than a little girl asking you to "do that pretty braid like mommy does" or "fix my hair for photo day".

Turns out I'm not alone in my misigivings and angst in this area: a chap called Craig Lawrey contacted me a few weeks ago about a book he's written called Does Your Daughter Have Dad Hair?

Continue reading Dad + daughter's hair: an inherent disaster?

Jif Peanut Butter is gluten-free, but ...

The PR agency behind Jif peanut butter has a promotion where they're asking for the best recipes that include Jif peanut butter. Okay, not a bad idea. When I got a copy of the query I responded that to me the real question is the quality of the food: two of my three children are on gluten-free diets.

To my surprise, they informed me that Jif actually is a gluten-free product. Now, before you say "well, yeah, it's peanuts and oil", you should know that just about all foods on the shelf now have the ambiguous "natural flavoring" and that's often where gluten is hiding, as an additive or flavoring. As I've learned, if it doesn't say "gluten free" you can't assume that it is, even when the ingredients are listed and there's nothing that's obviously a gluten product.

Turns out that Jif, while gluten free, has more ingredients than you might expect:

The challenge with peanut butter, of course, is to keep it creamy even as the natural tendency of the peanuts is to have the oil separate and the nut butter to coagulate and eventually become this thick glop. I've tossed more than one jar of all natural peanuts-only peanut butter for just this reason, and bet you have too.

Continue reading Jif Peanut Butter is gluten-free, but ...