May 23 2008

Snot-Nosed Kid

We let Robin have one friend and now he has a runny nose. This is why you should keep them locked in their rooms until they’re twenty-one. I mean, how is this going to impact his career?

Actually, though perhaps I should have kept him quarantined for public health, I took him back to the park today. His friend Jake from yesterday was not there, but another little boy named Leo was with his mother Natasha, and also a different mom and her older son Dino, who we had actually met before. Leo and Dino knew each other too. So it seems that despite my general grumpy misanthropy and reluctance to be “a joiner,” I may be stumbling into something of a playgroup. All the moms seem cool, and Robin really likes the other kids, so chances are that we will see them pretty frequently.

Natasha had a very cool baby-carrier for Leo: it was a structured backpack but it looked a lot cuter than the (to my mind) ugly-ass Baby Bjorn. I asked her about it and she said it was an Ergo, and that she had switched to it from the Baby Bjorn, after the latter had started hurting her back. She had only good things to say about the Ergo.

I was somewhat shamed on another mommy forum after I admitted that I had given up babywearing after only six months. The consensus was that this made me a wimp. But I just couldn’t hack the Moby sling anymore, and neither could Sam—it was killing our backs. Robin really liked it though, and there are supposed to be all kinds of benefits to keeping your child cuddled up to you when you’re out and about. It makes intuitive sense to me that small children need as much cuddling as possible. But the fabric-only slings, while visually attractive, just don’t give the kind of structured support that a pack-style carrier can.

So I think we are probably going to order an Ergo carrier. They’re supposed to work for babies up to three years old. I’ll give a full review when we try it out!