While Your Mom was sleeping, we ran across several interesting items that we wanted to share with everyone. This morsel came when we were discussing swaddling during March Madness. [What? Isn’t that what everyone talks about during great college basketball?] I mentioned that, back in the day, people would swaddle their babies and hang them from hooks to keep them out of the fire. My fellow game-watchers’ incredulity culminated in a Scrabble Challenge. And during the ensuing internet searches, we found …
The Zaky Infant Pillow, or as the San Francisco Chronicle’s The Poop Blog calls it, Scary Disembodied Mommy Hands. On sale now for just $40 a hand! Available in Vaguely Ethnic Beige and Boy MuppetBlue, Girl Muppet Pink, and, of course, Gender-Neutral Muppet Green. Now, I am pretty sure all those baby experts words were clear when they said, ahem “DON’T PUT ANYTHING IN THE CRIB WITH THE BABY.” Not even a bumper! Certainly not a murderous-looking dead hand.
I think the creepiness factor of The Babykeeper is actually outweighed by its usefulness. What mother haven’t you heard complaining about not being able to get a break peeing, especially when they were out and about with the baby. Though, do you hang them on the front of the door — like a salesperson letting you know which stall is yours — or on the back of the door, where they can have a bird’s eye view of the activities below. And, for the love of Pete, please don’t forget your baby. Thanks to The Poop, I now have an irrational fear of running to a public bathroom in an emergency and slamming the door, only to find a baby offering me a roll of toilet paper. And why does all useless baby crap cost $40? Did some economist figure out that is the exact price parents will pay for useless crap they have been made to feel is vital to their baby’s health and survival?
The end result of the Scrabble Challenge was that Your Mom was, as always, right. Query whether this image [to the right] is more or less upsetting than Mommy Hands? Though, I have to give Mommy Hands the less disturbing award based on what I read in the article in which this picture was found:
Since the infants were nursed while swaddled, they stewed in their own excrement for days at a time, the mothers leaving their babies “crying with all their might” in the cradle or “tossed in a corner” or “hung from a nail on the wall” while they “spend hours away from their cottages” during the day. Few traditional mothers or nurses heeded doctors’ pleas “not to let them lie in their filth,” so that during their first year of life they were usually “covered with excrement, reeking of a pestilential stench [their] skin completely inflamed [and] covered with filthy ulcerations [so that] if touched…they let out piercing cries.”
i-am-your-mom 