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You've got questions, she's got answers. Be among the first to read Elise Mac Adam's new etiquette guide.
Pre-order from:
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Last Chance
 The month is winding up and as promised, I have one more copy of The Perfect Baby Handbook to give away.
Sure you could buy it at you local small bookstore or online from the comfort of your bed, but why evert yourself? Wouldn't it be easier to be the first person to drop me a line at indieetiquette(at)yahoo(dot)com with the words: "Last Chance at Perfection" in the subject line. In the body of your email please include your mailing address. And apologies, once again, that I can only have the book posted to addresses in the United States.
I can promise you charm, irony, and well-oiled satire, all of which is generally in short supply these days.
Good luck and I'll post when a winner has been revealed to me.
UPDATE: One last winner has been made manifest. Thank you for reading and cheers!
posted by Elise at 5:34 AM
7 Comments
Competitive Childbirth
So I mentioned this was on my mind and thought I'd actually follow up instead of casting out leading statements, which is an annoying habit.
In the current (until Monday) issue of New York Magazine, there's a long article about a home birth midwife and her practice. The piece is called "Extreme Birth," which, of course, is pretty tantalizing.
The article details the working life of Cara Muhlhahn, the midwife who helped Ricki Lake deliver her second child, as documented in the movie The Business of Being Born, and includes details of the author's and his wife's experience with the birth of their child. (They are inclined to have a home birth but in the end do not.) The movie is extremely poorly disposed towards hospital births and tends to depict them in the most negative, wretched light while home births are splendid empowering achievements, points of pride, triumphant and beautiful things.
Now, I don't particularly care how my friends and acquaintences have their babies as long as everyone is healthy in the end, and the only time I've ever really cared about the actual WAY a baby came into the world was in the case of someone I know who was so powerfully invested in having a natural birth that I worried she might not be able to get over it if she needed medical intervention. Happily she did not.
But what I don't like at all, and didn't like about the midwife in the article and many of the people who had delivered their babies at home is the smug and unpleasant attitude they have toward people who had hospital births. I don't have any problem saying that both of my kids were born in a hospital and that I had interventions, if I'm asked, but I do have a problem when people I know ask me to justify my choices, as if I wimped out or did something dangerous or unfashionable.
So my feeling about these birth movements is that while they have a lot to do with giving women control over their birthing experience and all sorts of positive things like that, they also have a nasty side-effect of making people hugely competitive. Now, I'm totally happy that my friend had the birth she wanted and reasonably comfortable with the fact that she thinks I'm a jerk for not following her lead, but on the whole I wonder why so many people feel obliged to do so much preening, bragging and prostlytizing. This isn't to say that the midwives aren't as entitled as the doctors to make a living and promote their services, I just wish it didn't make everyone so annoying.
posted by Elise at 1:33 PM
3 Comments
2nd Chance at Perfection
 Good morning.
I was all set to rant (and surely will tomorrow) about various things, including competitive childbirth (and who doesn't love a good rant about that?)... but then I remembered that I have a jolly task on hand.
I'm giving away copies of The Perfect Baby Handbook, a text complete with all sorts of helpful illustrations and easy to follow guides on all subjects crucial to maintaining perfection in the very, very young. Just look at the detail in this illustration and you can see the careful study that went into analyzing perfect baby wearing.
If you would like to win a copy of The Perfect Baby Handbook, just be the first person to send an email to indieetiquette(at)yahoo(dot)com with the words "I'm Seeing Perfection" in the subject line and your name and mailing address in the body of your email. I'm afraid I still can't take any addresses from outside the United States (not my rules).
Cheers, and I'll post an update when there's a winner.
NO MORE BETS - We have a winner for today. Tune in again for one more chance to snag a copy in the next few days.
posted by Elise at 4:07 AM
0 Comments
Reentry
This was the first time that I have had tremendous difficulty returning from a vacation. It is possible, likely even, that the central reason for this is that I am staring down the barrel of a summer of low-reward work and feeling paralyzed instead of galvanized.
Anyway, here is what I learned on my spring break.
It is easier to learn how to swim in incredibly warm water than chilly water. (Though "chilly" is hugely open to interpretation it seems. I was happily paddling around with the kids and a sweet woman with whom I had been chatting who was sitting poolside, commented: "My husband says that you Northerners will swim in ANYTHING.")
When things get dire, try to stare at some fish for a while.
It is really true that neglecting the gym is made less problematic by not eating enormous quantities of candy (a hardship for me, I know).
One should try to travel with a variety of bathing suit styles for children (so that inevitable "chafing" doesn't wind up creating day-ruining tears and whining). Oh and while I am thinking about it, if one purchases "emergency" bathing suits because one was afraid the old ones might not fit so well, one should get them in sizes that correspond to the sizes the children actually are, not the sizes they will eventually wind up being in a year or so.
But I do have one big souvenir from the trip. The children have decided to share a room in the wake of bunking together while away. This gets the baby out of my bedroom and makes these temporary (yes, still) digs a little easier, in so many areas. Here's hoping it lasts, because I'm working where the crib used to be.
posted by Elise at 4:02 AM
0 Comments
Winner Number 1
We have a winner for the first of 3 copies of the Perfect Baby Handbook. Keep coming back, though, because there will be two more copies in the offing.
posted by Elise at 4:40 PM
0 Comments
First Chance to Win
We all aspire to perfection, do we not?
But of course there are some who not only are perfect, they were born perfect and for the parents of those children, who might easily be overwhelmed by the responsibility and the consumer choices involved in having such a prodigy, there is help at last.
There is The Perfect Baby Handbook, and a more useful guide to caring for and raising these increasingly familiar creatures does not exist.
Even if you are only suspicious that your progeny might possibly be perfect, this book is a boon, for it provides easy tests and helps guide you towards a better sense of the flawlessness of your child.
And if you have any doubt about it's place in the hierarchy of things, you can find it on this week's New York Magazine Approval Matrix... where it is trending toward the brilliant and not quite in the lofty heights of the highbrow.
So, I am having a little contest.
If you would like a copy of this book, I will be giving away three at scattered moments through the end of the month. Today is the first day to procure one and all you have to do to be the first on your block to own this witty, occasionally even gut-busting, yet practical book is to send me an email. The first person to write to me today gets a copy. All you must do is send a note to me at: indieetiquette (at) yahoo (dot) com with the words "Perfect Baby Handbook Must be Mine" in the subject line and your mailing address in the body of the email.
Unfortunately, winning addresses must be in the United States but beyond that, my email box is open and waiting.
Good luck. Today one of you has something swell coming your way. And keep in mind there will be two more copies in the offing later.
posted by Elise at 4:25 AM
0 Comments
Back From Beyond
Yes, indeed, my little family embraced tradition and skipped out of town for a few days of Spring Break. Historically, I never did much spring breaking when I was a kid, so the last couple of years where I have hopped out of town have had considerable novelty for me.
I am sure I'll say quite a bit about this trip, which was fantastic in many ways, but for the purposes of this setting, I have to comment on my return trip during which I spent about 50% of my flying time hating the woman in front of me (Mrs. 23D), another 45% trying to control my crazed not-yet-two-year-old and the final 5% thinking that if he did scream, it was nothing that Mrs. 23D didn't deserve.
The airline in its infinite wisdom had seated all four members of my family in different parts of the airplane. This was far from ideal. My four-year-old is not so easy-going about being on his own in that type of setting (understandably) and really, no one would be easy-going about having to sit next to Sebastian. Even I am not so relaxed about it, and I would be lying if I didn't have a moment of thinking that I could get some reading done if I were sitting all alone. But that wouldn't be fair to anyone.
The gate agents were unwilling to reassign seats and the flight attendants, while sympathetic, weren't particularly helpful. And so began a begging campaign.
No one wanted to be separated even a foot or two from his or her traveling companion for the two-and-a-half hour flight. I do understand, but things just felt ridiculous. Finally, I turned to the rather pinched woman in 23D who was studiously ignoring everyone around her. Assuming she was traveling alone I asked if she would swap a seat with me so that I could at least sit across the aisle from Sebastian (still dodgy, I know). She informed me that she was not going to abandon her family beside her (family of grown husband and I think daughter).
Now this is fair enough and suddenly the puzzle of finding four seats came together after my husband made a bargain for two seats in one row and a couple offered to take them and a kind gentleman made another swap and soon things were stable. So why I do I still hate 23D? She was entitled to ignore her family and do the New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle next to them. I think my reaction came from how uniquely unpleasant she was about my request (which was gentle) and how she sort of acted as if it was a huge imposition that I even asked (perhaps I knocked a word she was trying to think of out of her head).
Anyway, for the first time ever, when Sebastian lost it for a few minutes (under five), I didn't spend much time cringing or worrying what my neighbors thought of me. Whatever it was, I was thinking worse.
posted by Elise at 5:05 AM
2 Comments
Oh, Did they Grow?
Surely I'm not the only person who, when packing to go away for a few days over spring vacation, suddenly realizes her kids have grown in the twelve months since the last time she went away.
And yet I feel I might be. I was quite close to panting as I ran into a Gap today looking for replacements to outgrown things like rash guards. No one else in the Gap seemed sort of desperate.
Happily I only have to do this with one kid since the other one doesn't seem to grow that much and can always make use of hand-me-downs.
Would I be better about this if we traveled more often? I suspect I'll always space out and figure that the children are static until I realize that they're not.
And that's why they're so hungry all the time.
posted by Elise at 8:19 PM
0 Comments
Cleanliness...
While perusing a local online bulletin board for parenting, I encountered a strange conversation about sandboxes, wherein one anonymous parent said that she does not permit her child, who does love them, to frolic in the sand and was considering firing her babysitter for having allowed it (she found telltale sand in her child's shoes).
Now, I do know that the sandbox is a pain and it is surely SURELY filthy. I don't even want to imagine the kinds of filth there are in the sandbox, but aren't park lawns dirty for the same reasons (with the same crap)? I suppose one could just keep one's kids to the junglegyms with the rubberized floors underneath them (though in New York, those rubberized floors are the subject of rage because they get very very hot in the summer and can cause burns to kids' bare feet-- which is why there are signs all over the place cautioning to wear shoes). But these are the things that I start to find overwhelming. I never even thought about sandbox horror beyond insisting that the children wipe themselves down before leaving the playground and washing when they get wherever they're going.
Is it the thing now to forbid the sandbox? Is it just a city thing? Needless to say, once one thinks too hard on the possible horrors of the sandbox, one doesn't really want to embrace it, but I honestly don't know if I could keep both children out of it, particularly since when I'm alone with them and they're both playing in the local sandbox area, it is harder for me to lose sight of one of them.
I suppose there's always that idea that children who eat dirt have stronger immune systems. Are we still tossing that one around with confidence?
posted by Elise at 12:25 PM
6 Comments
Assembly Required
Perhaps it is a side-effect of too much Playmobil (where even hair ribbons are detachable and everything requires assembly), but my husband was so taken with this IKEA baby proposal that he asked me to forward it to the creator of the Perfect Baby Handbook for examination (soon, by the way, you will have your own opportunities to acquire this valuable pedagogical tool for new parents right here).
My husband is an often-mentioned off-screen character around here, featured in fragments, sort of the way Richard Diamond's secretary, Sam, never appeared in full in the television show Richard Diamond, Private Detective (a program I have only read about but have never ever seen, yet feel strangely comfortable referencing-- Sam's legs, by the way were first portrayed by Mary Tyler Moore in her first "regular" role).
Today, he deserves credit, because while he didn't actually need to assemble the children, he does put things together around here. It isn't so much that I'm not handy or suddenly go all butterfingers when faced with a rudimentary tool kit. Still, there are not enough hours in the day (and already I realize I'm behind on starting an essay that needs writing) and if he didn't sit down and do the grunt work we'd be in this temporary apartment, surrounded by clothes in old boxes and piled up on the floor, instead of some highly imperfect but acceptabe in a pinch fake dressers from Bed Bath and Beyond or the Conatiner Store.
I'm hoping that the next dresser will be something that doesn't require some ingenuity to construct and has drawers made of something other than canvas.
So if you're wondering why I never write about entertaining adults, there's a (partial) answer.
posted by Elise at 5:54 AM
0 Comments
Ought One Respond?
Today's bus ride was like any other, really, except that it was a bit crowded-- just full though, not packed. For whatever reason, Felix got bent out of shape at the prospect of standing. Even with the bribe of a Tootsie Roll, he began whining.
Much to my dismay, some kind man offered him a seat (since I wanted him to have to accept standing, but socially speaking, once the seat is offered and there is an end to the complaining within reach, one must take it for the Greater Good). He took it and though he murmured his thanks, I had to prod him into speaking up his "thank you."
Rolling along and miffed, I had a big conversation with Felix about how it may have worked this time but there would be no more whining about standing on the bus and this is reality and how irritating his behavior was. Felix took it in stride, nodded at the right places, appeared to understand what I was saying and where I was coming from, and by the time that exercise was over, it was time to hop off.
As we were leaving a Gentleman Well Beyond a Certain Age said loudly, to Felix: "Felix, you have a great mom." And he appeared to mean it.
So while there was no time to say anything to this man because we were getting out, I was taken aback a bit. Was I being praised for hectoring my kid? Was he really that bad? What was that about? What happened? Why was he listening anyway?
It doesn't matter now of course, and anyway, I'll bet you dollars to donuts that people on the crosstown bus next week will hear me delivering the same performance with slightly more impatient variations.
posted by Elise at 10:41 AM
3 Comments
Sobering
February was one of those months. There was a lot of ignominy to go around.
Something about breastfeeding so radically altered my mammogram (which I dutifully went to have, as per my doctor's recommendation after stopping breastfeeding-- and it took me under 12 months to get around to it so I WAS feeling ahead of the game) that I needed to have a biopsy.
If you have not had one, let me be the first to say that it is hard to maintain one's dignity during the breast biopsy procedure.
Once that was cleared up (and everything is fine, but I now have a new baseline, would that all rebirths could be so quick and involve bruising on only one side), I had to turn my mind to other unsavory matters. There was work, where I had to decide not to drive a hard bargain.
And then there was something else.
In a few weeks spring vacation will hit and this family is going away for a portion of it to someplace warm. This meant I needed a bathing suit. I have one but as I learned the hard way, one really needs more than one when one is traveling unless one wants to shoehorn oneself into a wettish suit and sit uncomfortably all the while knowing that every medical professional in the world advises against lounging around in wet bathing suits.
So I found an hour and went to try on some suits and I must say, I preferred the breast biopsy (except for the fear of negative results) to that exercise. In spite of the dressing room that had minimal flourescent lighting (low light for encouragement, I suppose, but still flourescent) and even a picture of an attractive potted plant on the wall, it was still a horrorshow. I also seem to be a strange fit for today's styles because everything was too long for me and I know better than to buy anything one of the kids could easily pull down.
I wish I could say it made me stick to the promise I made while squinting at myself from behind my fingers not to eat candy any more. But here I sit even now, guilty, with Smarties in my lap.
Anyway, that experience made me go right home, and order two more of the extremely reasonably priced, unsexy but super "sporty" bathing suit I already owned.
So I am sobered. For a moment I fell into the whole "sexy mom" trap that gets kicked around all the time. The problem is less in the going for it (though it is all a very expensive and time consuming proposition), than it is in being able to achieve it. Maybe someday when there's less certainty of one kid or another trying to tug my suit down for yuks, I'll be able to try for a kind of dignity or elegance. Maybe one day elegance will be within my grasp and it will be manageable instead of the impossible dream. Until then, I'm just glad I took care of all of that last month because here I am in March, ready to start again... with a new baseline.
posted by Elise at 6:46 PM
3 Comments
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