Okay, so people frequently ask my wife and I questions about parenting, like we know what we’re doing yet. For our benefit, I think I might type up some things we’ve agreed on.
We are raising Baby vegetarian. At least until she’s old enough to choose to eat meat herself, we’re not giving it to her and will flip out if anyone else does. We live perfectly well without eating meat, and our family will continue to do so as it grows. We are perfectly aware that being vegetarians requires extra thinking and effort. We’ve been vegetarians for almost 8 years. I’d also like to posit that, on the whole, vegetarians think more about what we eat than most (certainly not all) people do. As such, chances are that Baby will eat more healthily than most kids her age.
We are not buying a car. In fact, Baby will not be in a car any more than is necessary. Why would a baby who doesn’t need anything that’s more than a ten minute walk from our apartment need to be in a car? Babies die in cars every single day. Look at the fancy seats required for them. If Baby needed to drive somewhere (and sometimes she probably will), that’s a different matter. My parents never put us in a car except for weekend trips with Grandmom or to visit Grandmaw and Gramps in “the country.” We grew up walking to school, walking to the store, enjoying being able to play outside with kids who lived near us. I liked that freedom and seeing the sights, and we want that for our child. I don’t give people who drive their kids around shit for doing it, and I’d like the same respect. We arranged our lives so that we can be car-free. Certainly there are people who are not in a position to live without a car, and I don’t judge anyone for that. I know it’s not always possible, not in the United States. But it is possible for us, due to a lot of effort, a lot of sacrifice and — largely — a lot of luck (where we work, the MTA lines, etc.).
If you recently smoked a cigarette (and especially if you smoke in your house), you’re not holding Baby. This is Mama’s pet peeve, honestly. She’s read a lot about “third-hand smoke” and feels very strongly about it. You know who wins in a fight with a pregnant woman, especially one armed with good information? Baby’s health means more to us than anyone’s feelings, even if that sounds cold and mean. Instead of viewing this as mean on our parts, maybe people should stop smoking around babies, huh? Yesterday, a lady lit up right in front of us, in front of the hospital. Fortunately, almost all of the smokers I know are usually considerate — and recognise me as someone who’s not “against” smoking at all and who, instead, misses smoking with beer and coffee a great deal sometimes. We shouldn’t have to explain to most of the people I know that we’re not judging them. (If I had better self-control, I’d smoke socially myself, like I did for years. But two cigarettes turns into a pack and into a habit for me.)
While we are not likely to return to being practising Catholics again, that does not mean that Baby will “have no religion.” I know people who’ve gone to church their whole lives who don’t seem to have “any” religion. People who have protested this are being narrow-minded.
Baby’s not getting mega-pink, ballerinas and other “girl” stuff when she’s too young to prefer anything. Sure, she has “girl” cloths already. But she doesn’t have mega-you-know-it-when-you-see-it princess crap — yet. If she likes it, wants it and chooses it, she can be the biggest princess the world has ever seen. I’ll paint her room the pinkest pink I can find and get her all the wands and dollhouses she wants. But we’re not forcing anything on a child that’s not even born yet. We’ll be as thrilled if she wants to be a dancer as we will if she wants to play nothing but baseball for the rest of her life. It’s up to:
1) Her.
2) Her parents.
3) That is all.
Baby can have candy and sweets, in moderation. What good will teaching her that cookies are evil do? My brothers and I had treats and sweets in moderation, and I think we all have healthy relationships with candy, ice-cream and cookies. We enjoy them but don’t over-indulge. I think my parents did an exemplary job on this front. (My own belly is from over-indulging other things like pasta and french-fries.)
After all of this bitcing, I do feel badly, even though I know I shouldn’t, for hurting people’s feelings if when we have to. I suspect that the list of people whose feelings we are going to have to hurt might include my brothers, my parents, other family members, friends and co-workers — everyone! I don’t relish hurting people who I care about. Really. Still, I don’t think it’s our job to be understanding. It’s our job to raise our child in a way that we feel is right — backed up with knowledge and good sense, of course. I mean, we didn’t decide that third-hand smoke is unhealthy, that cars are dangerous for babies, that children can be both vegetarian and healthy. And we’ve certainly learned more about it than people who dismiss such ideas immediately have done.
And, there’s that which really trumps it all: We are Baby’s parents.
I suspect that, when Baby’s actually here, I won’t feel as guilty about hurting people’s feelings. I know it’s part of parenthood. My mother comforted me with this truth when I was lamenting having to hurt the feelings of someone I love very much. I hope it gets easier. Putting our child first is simple and, I think, easy to do. But that doesn’t make hurting other people easy at all.
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I admire your stance on these things. She’s going to be one very lucky baby, with you two at the helm.
Thanks, Ryan! :)
Thank you in advance for not forcing her to enjoy stereotypically “girly” things! More specifically, the child me that only wanted to play with Transformers, legos and Nerf guns and wasn’t allowed to, thanks you. :) (I could go on about the processed junk food I was fed as a child, and other things, but I don’t want my parents to look bad… there was still some good in my childhood).
I think it’s tough to balance doing some things differently while still reminding our parents that they did some things (or, as the case with my parents, MOST things) right. I try to remind my parents that, when we do something differently, it’s not a remark on their parenting. I am not ashamed to say that I had/have excellent parents!
Apart from the fact that our public transport in Auckland is rubbish and it’s scary as heck to commute on a bike in the city (people get hit all the time due to the lack of respect given by car drivers), I’m thinking you guys sound a LOT like Kiwis. People are less likey to give you unsolicited “advice” here too, unless they know you (I’m a dual national of the US and NZ and have lived in both). Maybe you just need to immigrate, LOL. Or, better yet, get your whole biking community to immigrate en masse. There’s another community like yours in Seattle that I’d like to do the same thing for. Seriously, your baby sounds like one lucky little bundle!
well, here is a piece of unasked for advice: if you want to enjoy the pleasures of smoking good tobacco now and then, try smoking a pipe. I never was a cigarette or cigar smoker, but, I have been able to smoke a pipe now and then,and not get addicted to the smoking habit. I now smoke about once every 3 months, while hanging out with friends, a good cup of coffee by my side.
I started smoking a pipe when I first became a cancer chemo patient- helped me relax, get rid of the very intense metallic taste that I used to get in my mouth from the chemo drugs. I have beem smoking my pipe about once every 3 to 4 months,and Ilik eit.
i wouldn’t worry about the new “Third Hand Smoke” meme. it derives from crusaders restlessly looking for their next Change Other People’s Behaviour goal, not from research. Several major-league anti-smoking researchers have been ostracised from The Cool Gang for their objection to the fantasist-driven nature of the pronouncements re it.
in fact, even the whole Second Hand Smoke thing is virtue-display driven, rather than research driven. yes, close very-very-dense indoor smoke will affect infants. babies. but that’s ONLY at the 2-parents-smoking-40-a-day-in-a-tiny-english-unventilated-room level. (for perspective, your bathroom is likely about the size of an average english living room. i’m not joking.) apart from that: nothing. once past very early formative stages (up to 6-12mths), and apart from SERIOUSLY dense smoke, the valid (that’s the key word) research is very very clear: there is no effect.
– in fact, one rather amusing result of a mass-research effort around the relatively-recent Scottish pub smoking ban, was that nearly all cohorts got WORSE, and the only one to improve was 11 year olds. suggesting necessarily that the primary constituents of scottish pubs are 11 years old.
– which they’re not.
– in fact, with the pub smoking ban, you’d expect kids to be WORSE off, as a result of parents reluctantly but compulsorily smoking more at home.
– the removal of passive smoking from the overwhelmingly centralised venue for it, had no effect.
i’d always taken the reportage of said research on face value. i’m australian. we’re so PC it’s insane. social suicide to even mention publicly that you think asian girls often have better bodies than white girls. and if i said there that i REALLY like black girls (yum), i’d be labelled a racist. seriously. a racist.
and i’m a health nut to a degree that makes you look like a pussy.
i’m health obsessed and ability obsessed like you wouldn’t believe.
and know more about most nutrition and lifestyle and exercise matters than any doctor since i’ve left australia.
when i started smoking a pipe after a stint in germany (i’d been anti-smoking for 40 years before) (it tastes DELICIOUS; the best way to finish a meal you’ve ever come across. non-smokers will grimace at my offer of a taste, and then explosively enthuse about it. explosively; rant and rave and declaim and demand another taste. to an embarrassing extent. but pipe tobacco is pure tobacco (after a LOT of work and skill — some of them take 2 years to finish fermenting. ever smelt black cavendish? soaked in bourbon? you can trust your nose, if not your tongue.) — not the chemical-infused crap they put in cigarettes), i dug hard into the research. and came away gob-smacked. most of what is loudly presented as “Fact” is a lie. i realise that sounds conspiracy-theory-alike. i have no truck with that. you should be aware i did my post-grad with a world-renowned researcher who taught HARD how to assess research. and my stats/maths is good enough for me to manage a $2bn fund on a quant basis. i’m not your usual idiot. i habitually pull apart “research” articles. i’m a scientist by nature: research is not what i do, it’s what i AM.
virtually all of the current smoking research is not worth toilet paper. validity issues like you wouldn’t believe. fundamental statistical flaws that you can’t believe got past peer-review.
but that’s the thing about peers. they’re peers. they’re driven to maintain the status quo. their peerdom. which makes them part of the in-crowd. a Social construct.
if i told you you had a 98% chance of no effect from something you found pleasurable, would you regard that as an evil? (coffee, by way of example, has a larger negative effect. do you like coffee?)
that’s the actual numbers for people who smoke heavily. cigarettes. and HEAVILY.
it gets sillier.
there’s been only ONE long-term study of passive smoking that’s Valid. it was set up by two rabid anti-smoking evangelists. rabid. to PROVE how bad it was. after 10 years, they came out with their first interim results. showing, at a good level of significance already, that there was NO effect for passive smokers.
they lost all their funding.
people were outraged.
but to their credit, they were amazed –this conflicted so WILDLY with what they were trying to prove– and decided they were scientists first and crusaders second. and got other funding.
it’s 40 years into it now, and their research shows only increasing levels of Significance: there is NO material effect on humans from passive smoking.
it gets sillier.
richard doll is the boy responsible for the current anti-smoking evangelism. he noticed in the 40s a correspondence between higher rates of lung cancer and smoking (that’s something that bugs me: people assume smoking created lung cancer. wrong. it’s been a constant through history, from before smoking was “invented”. heavy smoking “merely” lifts the incidence from 2 in 10,000 to 2 in a 100.).
now, here’s the thing. when the American Surgeon General came out with their big report on smoking, they’d got impatient with him hiding his data. and forced him to divulge it. and discovered he’d been hiding a few things. Cigar smokers, for example, have a 6% LOWER risk of lung-throat-mouth cancers than NON-smokers. Whoa. Pipe smokers have a *20%* LOWER risk of lung-throat-mouth cancers than NON-smokers. WTF? And people who smoke cigarettes but don’t inhale (used to be common in the old days, when smoking cigarettes was so much more a purely social reflex), have a LOWER chance of lung-throat-mouth cancer than people who DO inhale.
– all of this is in the american surgeon general’s report. which has latterly been priced out of most people’s reach/interest. (£1,800, the last time i looked)
just the last observation would have a GENUINE scientist going “whoa!” and getting seriously excited and realising our understanding of what causes lung-throat-mouth cancer is fundamentally flawed, and trying to set up further research into it.
richard doll hid it. hid the data.
it conflicted with and confused his crusade.
i really wouldn’t worry about people smoking near your baby.
hmm. just belatedly read your other commenters (amidst teeth-grindingly frequent browser crashes — yay macosx), and noticed daniel fielding smith’s comment. about pipes! quite bizarre fortuitivenessosity!
i will throw something else into the pot: which, frankly, i don’t understand and have no sensible theory for.
hayfever, of the seriously major: can barely get out of bed, eyes streaming, nose streaming, voice croaking; variety, clears up within about a minute of smoking a pipe.
we discovered this by accident last summer, when the rape/canola was in full flower and the air had every hayfever sufferer in a state of absolute misery. and T. at the pub was trying to work with his face all puffy and eyes like a frog’s. we’d had a running amusement of various people trying the pipe, and he in particular loved it. “well,” i said jokingly, when he came out on a break and leaned up against the wall in the sun in a state of absolute misery, “guess you won’t be wanting a pipe then.” and he paused, and said “oh f*ck it, sal. why the hell not. couldn’t possibly make me feel any worse.” and about 5mins later, i noticed and said “hey mate, you haven’t sneezed in minutes.” and he looked startled, and he thought a bit, and said “bloody hell. you know what? i can breathe normally too.” and his eyes had deflated, and he could see straight again, and his head was clear, and… etc. etc. “my hayfever has completely cleared up, sal!!” and he looked at the pipe with eyes like saucers.
i immediately lent him that pipe for the duration. seemed the decent thing to do.
it turned his life from misery into normality.
i have no explanation for this at all. but we tried it on another hayfever sufferer and exactly the same thing happened.
just something to throw into your pot of facts, for later resolution. and let me know if you find one! am intrigued…
I do miss smoking cigarettes, pretty damned badly at times. My own quitting has more to do with:
1) Money — I started smoking when $1.50 was steep for Camels.
2) My wife’s wishes — probably the biggest reason — I’m probably just telling myself that I’m not “whipped” and that I CHOOSE not to smoke, LOL.
3) Maybe health, Re: I usually FEEL better when I’m not smoking, though this is certainly partly (possibly mostly or entirely) psychology — which is not to say that I feel badly when I smoke. Hanging out with my pals in a bar, cafe’, backyard or campfire with coffee and cigarettes was, and still is, in a sense, one of my favorite things to do.
I don’t think I can ever be anti-smoking.
I have a very good pal who smokes, in part, as an expression of personal freedom in a state where you can’t smoke in any bars (even if there were a smokers only bar with a cover charge donated to charity or some such gesture). I like to light his smokes for him, while we enjoy coffee/beer together.
In the end, though, Mama doesn’t want smokers cuddling Baby, and I can’t argue with a pregnany woman. :^)
It does urk me to no end when an 80 year old lights up in front of (literally) four NO SMOKING signs outside the main entrance to a hospital, especially one considered one of the very best places to have a baby in Baltimore City. But I suspect that’s up there with being urking by men who bath in cologne and really stank people on the bus.
The new “research” on such “vices” as coffee has been surprisingly lately, too. Turns out that it’s not only NOT bad for you, it’s GOOD for you? Frankly, I don’t care either way. I love coffee to a degree that makes me want to stop drinking it at times. But I keep coming back. I don’t think I’d recognize myself without coffee. : )
I used to smoke a pipe when I was younger, but I kept using it like a big bowl of cigarettes, i.e., several a day, inhaling the whole way. I gave it up for regular cigarettes again. Perhaps, in my new role as Dad, I can revive this pleasure. I was a big fan of vanilla tobacco.
[...] so the whole, “You smoke; you can’t hold Baby,” thing might be over. I think. Not sure. But it’s up to Mama. It’s not [...]