Rookie Moms

WANTED! UNEMPLOYED BABIES

I saw the ad below for baby scientists in my neighborhood parent newsletter and it inspired me to think of more ways to find work for infants. A few ideas I have for getting your baby a job are:

• Baby doll: Seek out an expecting couple you know and offer to let them practice on your baby. They can bathe your baby. Go do something else during the bath so that you don’t act like a total control freak and scare your friends.
• Usability tester: If you live in the Bay Area, sign up for the LeapFrog toys user lab.
• Actor/Model: If you live in LA or NY, now is the time to force your child into showbiz.
• Cheerleader: Dress your baby in a college team outfit and take her to a sporting event. Let the team interpret her screaming as cheers.
• Paperweight: If baby is not yet crawling, place him on a stack of papers.

If you live in my neighborhood, let your baby be a scientist:

The Infancy Laboratory at UC Berkeley, is seeking infants 7-12 months of age to take part in studies on cognitive and emotional development. The studies take about an hour of parents’ time (but only about 10 minutes of baby’s), and involve coming to the campus where you will have your own private parking space (for an hour). At Cal, you will see some of the world-famous studies on how infants develop (as seen on the Discovery Channel and PBS), and you can participate in helping psychologists learn about the infant’s mind!

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You have a special super power in the first months of your baby’s life. Maybe this falls into the very large bucket of “nobody ever told me this was going to happen.” Your boobs might get all tingly for no apparent reason. For me, it could be triggered by

• hearing any baby cry
• having any emotion at all (sadness, confusion, joy, whatever)
• reading a menu and seeing hot chocolate was listed

So, my tip is that if you start to get a funny feeling in your chest when you read a menu, you are probably biologically programmed to neeeeed that very food. Order that hot cocoa (or whatever your boobs want) and enjoy!

Are you tired of every other word being “choo choo” or “digger” or “princess” (am I just projecting here?)? This too shall pass so take some pictures of your babe at his happiest and get in on the fun.

In my house, it’s all about trains!

Instructions for indoor fun: line him up with all his trains, in his engineers cap, Thomas books, and with any other related paraphernalia that you can’t believe has made it’s way to your house.

As an outing, go seek out the real thing and photograph him around town in front of the train station and at all the various train tables or models you visit on a regular basis!

Kirsten, a clever, crafty, and experienced mom, has made a booklet of her tips for new mommies available for download as PDFs.

She even has a cover that she herself embellished with a button to make it look adorable and handcrafted. She’s shared her booklet, Things I Wish I’d Known, with you in whichever format floats your boat. She encourages you to keep it for yourself or to make a nice version of the cover and give it as a gift.

The last page is blank, so you can add your own tips if you are passing it along.

• Cover
• Mommytips booklet
• Mommytips booklet - Booklet Ready

Kirsten says: I’m not trying to proclaim myself a parenting expert at all, but I consider myself a fairly well-informed parent and I think that many of these tips would be useful to new parents. You know how it is, you finally find something that works and you think “If only we’d known that before!” (Hence the title.)