Musings About Life... After Birth

Tune into “Broadminded” on XM Radio’s Channel 155 tomorrow at 6:20 PM or 10:20 PM EST to hear another one of my “As Tried on Broadminded” segments. The Broads and I will be discussing the loveliness that is adult acne and the best ways to fight it.

If your big zit can’t wait until tomorrow, check out the recent article on treating adult acne that I wrote for The Family Groove.

I’ll also be sticking around for American Idol recap, offering up my thoughts on all the lame contestants including Blake Lewis (a.k.a. Ben Mackenzie’s stunt double on The O.C.), Jordin Sparks (my new favorite, I guess) and Chris Richardson (please stop singing, which you do poorly, and just stand there and look cute, which you do quite well).

Summer’s just around the corner, which means that for me and the Momtourage, time spent strolling around the mall and playing in the germ pit at the My Gym will soon be replaced with days at the park and the pool. Because we all live in DC, this unfortunately means we - and our kids - will be exposed to hordes of bloodthristy mosquitoes.

Perhaps it’s because he’s just so sweet, but my kid always seems to get particularly attacked by these evil bugs; even after just 15 minutes spent outdoors last summer, the poor guy would look as if he’d just caught a bad case of the chicken pox. I wanted to do all I could to protect him from the mosquitoes, but dousing him in acrid-smelling, chemical-laden bug repellent didn’t seem like a safe alternative - especially after reading about how large amounts of DEET, a common chemical in bug repellent, can induce comas in little kids. While I understood the mosquitoes’ phenomenal taste in children/dinner, I wasn’t cool with allowing my child to serve as their version of filet mignon, so I knew I had to find a solution.

Fortunately, I discovered Avon’s Skin So Soft Bug Guard Plus IR3535 Active Insect Repellent Gentle Breeze Towelettes. These kid-safe, DEET-free handy little insect repellent wipes are not only tremendously effective, but their insect repellent delivery is genuis: the repellent is soaked onto individual towelettes, with just enough to cover one person. They’re so much easier to apply than repellent from a spray bottle; there are no drippy, leaky, sticky bottles to fool with, and you won’t need to worry about squirting yourself or your kid in the eye with chemicals or creating a huge cloud of noxious gasses when you use them. Though the towelettes are pleasantly scented with Skin So Soft’s signature sweet/musky scent, there’s no need to worry that their yummy smell with actually attract bugs. In fact, mosquitoes react to them much like I do when I hear Celine Dion’s music: they leave the scene immediately, knowing that their senses have just been painfully assaulted. The result: you and your kids are free to frolic outdoors without fear of being eaten alive. As an added bonus - the towelettes even have SPF 15 in them. What more could you want, really?

The towelettes - perfect for tossing (and taking up little room) in your summer beach bag -are $5.99 for a pack of 8. To purchase, click here. When you have a bite-free summer, you’ll thank me.

My son has recently become obsessed with sticking his hand in the toilet. His most favorite thing in the world to do is to zoom into the bathroom, lean over the seat and stick his entire arm in the bowl and swish it around in the water. Awesome, right?

When my husband and I see this happening, we run after him and scream “No!!!”. After doing so, we yank him away from the toilet and then furiously wash his hands, all while he giggles maniacally. We try to keep the bathroom doors closed, but he’s nearly figured out how to open them. We got those toilet lock things, but they broke. We just installed new ones, so hopefully they’ll last, but I think in the battle of the toilet lock vs. the Kaplan toddler, the toilet lock is Sanjaya Malakar and the Kaplan toddler is Melinda Doolittle; the lock, though borderline offensive in its ridiculousness, is an option worth entertaining, but we all know it will never quite go the distance against its far superior competition.

My husband recently began saying “No! Yucky!” when our son goes for the toilet. The kid has come to hear this phrase so often that he now associates the word “No!” with “Yucky!” He’ll throw his leftover cheerios to the ground after eating and when we go “No!”, he goes “No! No! Yucky!”  Banging on Mommy’s laptop also gets a “No!”, which is always followed by him saying “No! No! Yucky!” Today I asked him if he wanted some raisins, his favorite snack. He replied, “No yucky! Toilet yucky!”

My pediatrician recently informed me and my husband that because our son is 18 months old, we should start introducing him to the idea of the toilet because potty training time’s around the corner. “Oh, he knows all about the toilet,” I said. She thought this was great and advised us to refrain from using negative words like “yucky” to describe the toilet so that he associates it with positive notions.

Guess we’ll be changing his diapers well through middle school.

Kids music that doesn’t suck is right up there with painless bikini waxes and enjoyable visits with your in-laws: purely oxymoronic in nature. It’s usually either too saccharine (Raffi) or just too plain lame (anything from Barney or Disney), which sucks, because your kid is gonna want to listen to that stuff every time you get in the car regardless. You wonder which drivers on the road are filled with the most road rage? It’s moms, because they’re the ones who have to drive around with kids begging for “The Wheels on the Bus” 8 million times over. Can you blame them for wanting to flip other drivers off?

When my son turned 1, Momtourage member Lauren gave him the “We are the Laurie Berkner Band” DVD, explaining that her daughter was obsessed with it. My kid had never been particularly interested in watching t.v., but on one particularly whiny afternoon, my husband popped in Lauren’s gift, hoping it would work its magic on our kid. Well, work its magic it did; not only was my son totally mesmerized by it, but my husband and I were also. The video itself was fun to watch, the songs were completely catchy in a really clever, unique way and the acoustic guitar/keyboard music itself was seriously good; Laurie and her 2 bandmates are skilled musicians who genuinely seem like they’re enjoying what they’re doing.

I’ve since acquired all of Laurie’s other CDs and they rule just as much as the DVD does. My kid loves them, and my husband and I do too. When I catch myself singing the songs in my head or my kid begs me to repeat the words to some of the songs, it doesn’t annoy me in the slightest. Lauren also tipped me off to the fact that Laurie and her band are often on “Jack’s Big Music Show” which can be seen on Noggin and Noggin on Demand. Let’s just say that occasionally Mommy breaks the no t.v. rule to watch this show in hopes of catching a Laurie performance.

The other night when Lauren and other Momtourage members Linda and Melissa and I were all out together celebrating Melissa’s birthday, the subject of Laurie came up. Linda, strangely, had never heard of her. “WHAAAAAAAAT?” Melissa, Lauren and I gasped, incredulous. We then launched into “Victor Vito”, one of Laurie’s classic tunes, right there in the middle of Rosa Mexicano, much to Linda’s horror. I’d love to blame our spirited performance on the pomegranate margaritas, but the truth is that we all just love ourselves some Laurie Berkner Band. The other day Lauren mentioned that a friend of hers saw Laurie at a concert in NYC.

“Noooooooo! Really?” I asked, insanely jealous.

“I know, right? The next time she’s playing, we totally need to make a road trip to go see her, right? I mean, seriously, how awesome would that be?” Lauren asked. You would have thought we were talking about The Beatles.

“Um, totally! We are so there!” I replied with the obsessive enthusiasm most college-aged stoners exhibit for a Phish show or teenyboppers (okay, and me too) feel for Justin Timberlake.

So seriously, go and buy yourself a Laurie Berkner Band CD (“Buzz Buzz” and “Victor Vito” are my faves, but they’re all great) and/or the DVD; I promise you’ll love them just as much as I do. And when you, say, catch yourself driving around solo in your car and you get a hankering to listen to “Victor Vito”, don’t fight that feelin’.

Tonight at 8:00 EST I’ll be appearing on “What Would Your Mother Say?”, a radio show on Stanford University’s KZSU 90.1 FM. To listen live, click here. To call in, dial 650-723-9010.

I’ll be the featured expert guest, discussing two articles I wrote for match.com and msn.com, “Men Reveal: Why I Cheated” and “Why I Cheated: Women Fess Up”. These articles, which ran on the MSN.com homepage in late 2006, were the #2 and #6 most-read articles, respectively, on MSN.com in 2006 - and we’re talking even including the news, sports and entertainment articles. I’m not sure what this say about MSN.com readers’ tastes in “news”, but clearly, the topic’s a popular one.

In the spirit of this appearance, my question for all of you out there…..have YOU ever cheated on a boyfriend or girlfriend? Why did you do it? Have you ever been cheated on? How did you respond to it?

It’s cherry blossom season in D.C.! For one week every year, DC’s famed cherry blossoms are in bloom, and the whole town (and thousands of Japanese tourists in to visit their country’s gift to the U.S.) goes wild for the gnarly trees an their pale pink blooms. Yesterday Momtourage member Melissa and I took our sons to go check out the trees, and they did not disappoint. Below is my little guy enjoying the day:

If you’re ever planning a trip to in D.C. in spring, do all you can to make it coincide with cherry blossom season - it really does live up to the hype.

When you are the parent of a toddler, you soon realize that experience of taking your child places that aren’t kid-friendly generally falls somewhere between “pretty difficult” and “a total and complete horrendously excruciating nightmare”.  Case in point: tonight my husband and I took our son to his first Passover Seder, which we attended at our amazing next-door neighbors’ home. While the event had all the makings of a lovely evening, it was completely nerve-wracking for the two of us, as our son was the only kid there who was under 14. From the minute we arrived he was a wild man; he ran around our neighbor’s home, grabbing the food in their dog’s bowl, pulling out each of their DVDs one by one and grabbing the tennis balls on the bottom of the hostess’s elderly father’s walker and screaming “Ball! Ball!” (much to Grandpa’s dismay). “Birth control, ladies,” I said to my neighbor’s two college-aged nieces as I yanked my son away from pushing the buttons on the dishwasher they were standing near. Fortunately, our hosts found his behavior amusing and weren’t in any way annoyed by it. Regardless, the evening was completely stressful for my husband and me; we basically spent the entire time praying for it to end without our kid totally wrecking our neighbors’ place or without our son having a meltdown, which luckily, he didn’t. While I loved being with our neighbors and their family, I couldn’t help but continually wish that we were at our home, surrounded by my kid’s books and toys, with multiple episodes of “Bob the Builder” queued up on the t.v. should a distraction (read: 15 minutes of peace and quiet) be necessary. Equally satisfactory would have been a room full of other parents with little ones, because you know those folks wouldn’t have batted and eyelash any time my kid yelled “CRACKER!” when the matzoh was in view or spit out his gefilte fish and declared it “yucky”.

As we left (early, as it was way past our son’s bedtime and his eyes were nearly rolling back in his head), we apologized for the chaos our kid created. “I told you when you invited us that he’d make for an entertaining Seder guest,” I said to the hostess as we walked out the door. “He was fine! He’s only 18 months old!” she sang. “Besides, when it’s not your kid, you barely even notice anyway.”

Perhaps she was lying to make us feel better, and if so, I appreciate it. However, I’m thinking that for next year’s Seder, it’s unleavened cheerios at our house, and all of y’all with little kids are invited.

Momtourage member Jamie is in many ways a hero to me.

A few years ago when she was barely 30, Jamie married Jeff, a fantastic guy who has custody of his 6th grade daughter. I imagine that a lot of women her age would have balked at the thought of marrying a guy if it also involved taking on mothering his preteen girl, but Jamie didn’t. She embraced both Jeff and his daughter with a heart full of love, and has never acted as if Jeff’s daughter is anyone other than her very own child. When we first met and I heard her story, I asked her how she deals with the difficulty of raising a surely hormonal, eye-rolling preteen girl. To my surprise, she giggled and was totally nonchalant about it, saying it is “totally fun”. “I love schlepping to cheerleading competitions and listening to the Black Eyed Peas song ‘My Humps’ so often that I’ve memorized all the words,” she laughed.  Sure, Jamie has moments of motherhood-induced stress and nuttiness, but don’t we all? She’s one of those moms who’s doing the best she can, but as far as I’m concerned she does a heck of a lot better than most.

Jamie, I so want to hate you because you’re smart, beautiful and you lost your pregnancy weight in a minute (the photo above was taken when her son was six months old - seriously, who looks this good in a bikini ever, much less six months after popping out a baby?), but I can’t; you ‘re a great friend and a terrific Mom. This one’s for you.

I’m kicking off a new regular post today: Monday Mom Must-Have. Because of my editorial and radio gigs, my email inbox and snail mail box are flooded with all sorts of PR pitches from people trying to promote their cool stuff. This allows me to keep on top of what’s cool in all sorts of arenas – especially the kiddie market (not to mention be on a first-name basis with the FedEx, UPS and DHL guys). As a result, the Momtourage and my other Mom pals are always asking me for tips on the latest and greatest, so I thought I’d share it with you too. You never know when you might need something for yourself or for a friend’s kid, right? Today’s must have: one of my all-time favorite kid gear items, the Patemm Pad.

The Patemm Pad is a large, circular-shaped changing pad that features inner pockets to hold wipes, diapers and diaper cream, rendering a diaper bad almost unnecessary. What makes this changing pad so freaking great is that folded it’s rather small, but unfolded it’s HUGE, so when you lay your kid down on an unsavory public changing table, you can be certain he won’t touch any part of it’s nasty surface. I was turned onto it by my friend Alicia, and since I’ve owned it I constantly get “That changing pad is sooooooo cool, where did you get it?” queries every time I whip it out. Apparently celebs love the Patemm too - Courtney Cox and Gwyneth Paltrow are huge fans. The pads come in a variety of pretty oilcloth fabrics that are easily wiped down. If you prefer, you can also get one made of organic cotton (Gwyneth has this variety) that is machine-washable. I own the oilcloth Jack Martin print, which, though described on the Patemm website as black and gray, really looks like chocolate brown and light blue, my fave color combination. I own the “large with pockets” variety, which retails for $48 (a chunk of change, I know, but trust me, it’s one of the best kiddie-gear investments you can make). In addition to adoring the pad itself, I love that it was created by Grace Welch,  a mom herself. Patemm, named for her kids Patrick and Emma, has become her at-home business and it allows her to work and be with her kids as much as possible. Now, how good will you feel about supporting this kind of business? The Patemm pads range in price from $30-48. They’re only sold online, so visit www.patemm.com to purchase one of yourself or your favorite mom or mom to be. I guarantee you (or she) will become obsessed too.

This article from today’s NY Times may be the coolest, sweetest, most inspiring thing I’ve read in a while. I am still crying after reading it.

I know I joke all the time about wanting my son to be gay so he’ll never leave me for another (blonde, non-Jewish - no offense to all those fantastic blonde, non Jewish ladies like my friends J.R. and M.S. out there….) woman, but I am teasing - who would wish for their child a life that incoherently, sadly and unfortunately involves challenge? Of course, I’ll totally accept him, love him and celebrate him no matter which choice he makes - gay, straight, or even (gasp) Republican. Regardless, should he one day break the news to me that he’s gay, I hope I handle it - and anything else he ever decides to do that goes against my grain - just like these parents did.

I am so in awe of their fabulousness.