"All the apple-cheeked babies, captured for eternity in Creamsicle onesies three sizes too big, are nearly grown."

That's the first sentence of what?

The incredibly long and abstruse Sports Illustrated article about Peyton Manning, from which I was unable to extract the reasoning for choosing him as Sportsman of the Year (other than, looking at the sidebar of other possibilities, the lack of anyone more compelling).

When the hell did sportswriting turn into that sort of thing? Babies. Onesies. Should a man even use the word "onesies"? Creamsicle? Come on, people.

But if we're going to talk about football, let's talk about the Green Bay Packers humiliating the Dallas Cowboys last night. Wasn't that a highly emotive experience?

"It took me everything not to cry," McCarthy said..... "I was drained. I don't think people realize what professional athletes put into a contest. Just to see the emotion of guys... what we overcame. I don't have the words. My vocabulary's stuck right now. It was incredible."

Mars needs women. Women have the words. We're more verbal. We can say "onesies" and "babies" and "Creamsicle" and more. But I'll just say "the emotion of guys"... I love that. And... go, Packers, and good for you, Peyton Manning.

"iPad baby seat inspires campaign to stop the parenting apocalypse."

Check out the Fisher-Price the Apptivity Seat. Link goes to an article in the L.A. Times, not to Amazon, as you might suspect, but if you want to buy one, here's the Amazon link. The L.A. Times article includes some snark from comments at Amazon, stuff like:

"This product is great. Exactly what I was looking for. Everyone should own one of these. Fisher-Price does it again. Hail Satan."

But let's be fair-minded. Let's compare this product (with the iPad inserted) to the usual distract-a-baby devices. There's television and there are those horrible mobiles people hang over cribs. Here, for example, is the Fisher-Price Discover 'n Grow Twinkling Lights Projector Mobile. Why would we think that is better than an iPad? First, you need to ask, what are the iPad apps for babies?
Check out Infant Visual Stimulation By Think Design Studio and Early Sensory Stimulation for Your Infant. These things look better than the DVDs of Disney movies or episodes of "Sesame Street" that people put on the TV for babies, and they seem immensely better than those nightmarish mobiles.

Here's a NYT article — "New Milestone Emerges: Baby’s First iPhone App" — with some info on how much time babies spend in front of various screens. (American Academy of Pediatrics says the amount for children under 2 should be: zero.)

The survey found that children under 2, on average, spend an hour a day in front of screens — engaging in activities like watching television, using computers, viewing DVDs, playing with mobile apps. Children ages 2 to 4 averaged two hours a day, and those 5 to 8, two hours and 20 minutes.

It seems to me, in the real world, an Apptivity Seat with a high-quality baby app is a pretty good idea compared to the alternatives, unless the alternative is holding the baby in your arms and talking and singing or whatever the real, old-time human interactions were. Of course, we still do that much of the time, but not all of the time. In that off-the-lap time, what's the baby supposed to do? Not for too long, of course.

NOTE: If you told me it harms the development of the baby's eyesight, I would completely change my mind on this. Personally, I believe staring at the computer caused me to start to need reading glasses, but maybe that would have happened anyway, and I had the bad habit of locking on to the computer screen, for many hours a day, often more than 10 hours a day.

"Bad Eating Habits Start in the Womb."

According to the NYT.

I'm choosing to post this now because I believe in the value of the unborn comments within you readers.

"My doctor told me that it was fine to fly up until the third trimester, so when I was five months pregnant I decided to take one last big trip... to Mongolia."

"People were alarmed when I told them where I was going, but I was pleased with myself.

I liked the idea of being the kind of woman who’d go to the Gobi Desert pregnant, just as, at twenty-two, I’d liked the idea of being the kind of girl who’d go to India by herself.... I liked sitting in a booth in a dark room full of smoking, gay Mongolians, but my body was feeling strange.... When I woke up the next morning, the pain in my abdomen was insistent....

"Men Should Pay for Maternity Care Because BABIES."

Headline at DoubleX about babies, written in babytalk. Here's the argument:

The long-term prosperity of the U.S. depends on healthy citizens, men supply the sperm, it’s just a genetic lottery that made you a man and not a woman, and think of your mother who had to bear you!

But even if you don’t care at all about the women bearing the children, you should care about live human babies that are going to be born regardless of whether their mothers get adequate prenatal care. And really, really bad things happen to babies whose mothers don’t get adequate prenatal care. 

At the point when you purchase insurance, the individual customer would like only to insure for things that are possible. Everyone at the point of purchase knows whether they are male and thus naturally and absolutely immune to the risk of pregnancy. So why can't they get a price based on what they need to insure? The argument at the link is coherent only if you concede that we are no longer talking about insurance. We're talking about taxation to pay for a welfare benefit. 

If we weren't so deeply embroiled in Obamacare, it might be interesting to talk about whether the government should subsidize all maternity care. To do so would nudge women away from abortion. Perhaps the government could use the opportunity to gather information about the quality of the parenting that is likely to ensue and to take stronger actions to protect the "long-term prosperity of the U.S."

Remember, women's bodies are the portals through which all future generations of humanity must enter the scene. Old-school feminism took umbrage at thinking about women as containers of babies, but today's feminists are more like old-fashioned wives, and the message is: Pay the bills!

Pianist Maria João Pires horrified, frozen, as the orchestra begins a Mozart concerto other than the Mozart concerto she prepared.

Watch her dismay, and watch the conductor, Riccardo Chailly, push her to go ahead and play the concerto she didn't expect to be playing that night. Watch her regain her composure and play.



And if you're in the mood for more emotion and music, here's a baby listening to her mother sing and displaying an unearthly profundity of response:

"If you're like most normal people, you've briefly considered eating a baby or two."

"Not literally, of course. That would make us no better than hamsters or wolf spiders. But pretend baby-eating – that is, explaining to an infant that she is so cute that you just want to gobble her up, or, in extreme cases, gently grabbing a pudgy appendage and making Cookie-Monster eating sounds – is not unheard of among H. sapiens...."

It takes big balls not to help with diaper changing and feeding and bathing the baby.

Or something like that —  according to a new and purportedly scientific study reported at BBC.com.

Be careful, ladies, about bragging to your friends about how much your man is helping with the baby. You may be unwittingly revealing that his testicles are small.

And, note, the scientists can't say which came first, the testicle size or the degree of helping with the baby. So getting the man to help might cause shrinkage of the testicles.

So men, asked to help, might beg off using a testicle-size-maintenance argument. 

The problem of big babies.

Literal big babies.

It's a serious medical issue.

Figurative big babies are another matter. A cultural issue.

"Elizabeth Mort never imagined that the last thing she ate before giving birth to her daughter - a poppy seed bagel - would lead to the loss of her newborn..."

"... but that is exactly what happened after the Jameson Health System failed to account for the possibility that her positive urine drug screen was due to her ingestion of poppy seeds...."

"Spain arrest over baby trapped in the drains."

"The two-day-old baby boy - who still had his umbilical cord attached - was found wrapped in plastic bags in the manhole in the building's courtyard."

The baby was found after a neighbour had heard what he thought was a meowing cat trapped in the drains and decided to alert firefighters....

That's in Spain. You remember a recent story of a baby rescued from a drain in China.

There must be many babies in drains that are not discovered.

The funniest thing in the world: rubber bands.

(Via Metafilter.)

"There is a 400 year old tradition in Japan to make babies cry."

"Every year mothers hand over their babies to sumo wrestlers who make them cry. Baby crying is considered healthy and a prerequisite for good luck. The winner of the contest is the sumo wrester who makes the baby cry faster, usually by scaring them...."

"S., who had never seriously considered adoption, was overwhelmed when Baby S., a healthy girl, was born in May 2012."

From a long NYT Magazine article titled "What Happens to Women Who Are Denied Abortions?" that concentrates on one 24-year-old woman.

“It was like, whoa!” S. recalled. “That first night was terrible. I was tired, and she was so hungry, and she had a very loud cry. They don’t tell you how hard it is to nurse your baby. You don’t know how painful it is for something to eat off you, and it’s pulling your skin.” She developed plugged ducts, a condition in which the breasts become painfully engorged with milk.

It’s not unusual for new mothers to have trouble breast feeding, but S. felt overwhelmed in other ways too. “This baby is such a crybaby, and I didn’t know what was going on,” she said. “I felt like she didn’t love me, like maybe she was mad at me.” S. watched bitterly as her family members held a contented Baby S. When S. held her, the baby would begin to cry. It went on like that for weeks. S. sometimes buried her head in her pillow, crying, when the baby cried. “Her tone was negative,” one of S.’s sisters remembers. “She would become angry, saying she wished the baby would shut up.”

"Mother of the Chinese baby flushed down the toilet says she was abandoned by the boy's father..."

"... after their one night stand and could not afford an abortion."

This case is getting a lot of attention because of the vivid details seen in photographs, but realize that it's the seen part of something much larger and mostly unseen:

There are frequent reports in Chinese media of babies being abandoned often shortly after birth, a problem attributed variously to young mothers unaware they were pregnant, the birth of an unwanted girl in a society which puts greater value on boys or China’s strict family planning rules.

"Elimination communication" — babies without diapers — "is finding an audience in the hipper precincts of New York City."

"Ms. Shapiro, who is a doula, a birth and child-rearing coach, says it is practically now a job qualification to at least be able to offer diaper-free training as an option to clients. Caribou Baby, an 'eco-friendly maternity, baby and lifestyle store' on the border of artsy Greenpoint and Williamsburg, has been drawing capacity crowds to its diaper-free 'Meetups,' where parents exchange tips like how to get a baby to urinate on the street between parked cars."

It's Earth Day, baby. Catch up with the hipsters! Get cracking! Or do you not even know what a doula is? Well? Do you or don't you? Do you doo doo with a doula?

If you had to choose a dimension within which to aspire toward hipness, would you choose poop? Perhaps there's something especially hip about expressing lofty aspirations in the lowliest medium.

"We thought it would be sitcom-style hard — not necessarily with a feel-good resolution at the end of every episode..."

"... but at least punctuated by those frequent moments of uplift indicating that, in spite of everything, life really is beautiful, isn't it?"

I'm pretty sure it's like that for some people, but for many of us, it's not. For many of us, it's not good hard, as in a "good hard workout"; it's bad hard, as in, it sometimes feels like something bad is happening to you.

But does anyone really remember this? I don't. I only know it's true because I remember saying it out loud, and because I wrote the previous paragraph almost three years ago, with Rosie sleeping at my side, in a typo-filled document titled "Before I Forget."

Thinking about George W. Bush.

1. He just became a granddad.

2. A Guantanamo detainee is railing against the President on the op-ed page of the NYT: "Gitmo Is Killing Me."

One man here weighs just 77 pounds. Another, 98. Last thing I knew, I weighed 132, but that was a month ago... The only reason I am still here is that President Obama refuses to send any detainees back to Yemen. This makes no sense. I am a human being, not a passport, and I deserve to be treated like one.

"If we could strip away the influences of modern Western culture and media and the high-fructose, high-salt temptations of the junk-food sellers..."

"... would we all be eating like Inuit elders, instinctively gravitating to the most healthful, nutrient-diverse foods? Perhaps. It’s hard to say. There is a famous study from the 1930s involving a group of orphanage babies who, at mealtimes, were presented with a smorgasbord of thirty-four whole, healthy foods. Nothing was processed or prepared beyond mincing or mashing. Among the more standard offerings— fresh fruits and vegetables, eggs, milk, chicken, beef— the researcher, Clara Davis, included liver, kidney, brains, sweetbreads, and bone marrow. The babies shunned liver and kidney (as well as all ten vegetables, haddock, and pineapple), but brains and sweetbreads did not turn up among the low-preference foods she listed. And the most popular item of all? Bone marrow."

Mary Roach, "Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal." (pp. 63-64).

"It didn't have eyes or a mouth but it was like screeching, making this noise."

"It was weird. It sounded like a little alien."

The nurse — who'd been "handed a 18- to 24-inch-long newborn in a glass pan by an assistant who asked for her help" — said she was "so 'freaked out' that she left the room and did not know what happened to the baby."