Post-baby pinks

So far the post-baby blues have not set in. (I did have a case of the blahs recently, but that was unrelated and requires its own post.) Which means that my mind is free for philosophy - of the sort that can be compressed into ten-second intervals, of course, since that is the new unit of measurement by which my spare time comes in.

-Diapers: paper v. cloth. It's not the thought of washing the things out that keeps me spending horrendous amounts of money on the disposable convenience; it's the horror of the diaper pins and the drag of inventing a System. I hate the thought of sticking my baby with the nasty pins, and I detest the thought of leaving rust stains in diapers from inevitably rusty and constantly dulling diaper pins. And while I don't blanch from the thought of washing out a cloth diaper by hand - at least not during this nice pre-solids phase - I don't have the means or the wherewithal to deal with it nicely, since I can't drop everything mid-change to scrub out the diaper, don't like the thought of leaving diapers soaking in sinks around the house, don't want the nastiness of a diaper pail to collect smells and mosquito larva, and can't run individual loads of laundry spiked with high amounts of bleach to keep the diapers in a pristine enough condition to use again and again. Hence the terrific waste of money on paper diapers. It's a quality-of-life issue, and I gnash my teeth at it, but there's no better solution, so I gnash away.

-Double chin: Baby is very cute, but when her head lolls downward on her chest it almost looks like she has a double chin. Since this is something that only fat people have, like the giantess queen in The Silver Chair, and my baby is patently not fat, this double chin requires constant denial, a rather tricky proposition since Baby's Papa has discovered Baby's Mama's Achilles Heel and incessantly teases Baby about her supposed double chin in Baby's Mama's hearing. Baby's head is constantly coaxed upward to mitigate the effect of this optical illusion, but as her laugh involves a sustained cackle, averting the eyes, and ducking the head, and as she grows increasingly jollier, the regimen becomes difficult to maintain.

-Trivial songs: Recently someone sang 'Jesus Loves Me' to Jane, and then added, 'But I'm sure your Mommy sings that to you all the time.' And then it dawned on me that actually, no, I have not been singing Christian baby songs to Jane, and I started questioning whether that made me a bad mother. And I decided that it didn't: it merely reflects my subconscious take on my thinking about music. I still sing Christian songs in front of her, as I did before she was born, just as I always do when I'm in the car and feel like singing. Usually these are hymns or choruses or sacred songs I remember from Chamber Choir and like to sing. When I'm specifically singing to her, though, I either sing secular lullabyes or else fun, frivolous folk songs like 'Oh, Susannah,' 'I've Been Working On The Railroad,' 'Clementine,' 'I Love You (A Bushel And A Peck),' etc. So then I thought it through more thoroughly and decided that I actually didn't really like trite Christian children's songs like 'Jesus Loves The Little Children.' I still haven't thought it through very thoroughly at all, though, so there may well indeed be deep depths of doctrine lurking in some of these songs. But for the moment, I think I still think they're shallow.

-Noah's ark: Along the same lines, I was surprised to hear Michael's take on this recently when he asked me how I felt about letting our kids play with Noah's ark toys. Never really thought about it, why? Because he feels that the rendition of Noah's ark as a cute little cartoon boat full of fluffy animals renders the image of God's wrath and judgment as harmless and obsolete, like some quaint folk tale that is now child's play. Whether this is a direct plot from Satan to make us forget the evils of mankind that called down God's wrath in the first place is not at issue here. Do we really want to teach our children to play with and laugh about and treat as a cute little fable something that is an actual historical fact of worldwide destruction? Would we let our kids play with Twin Towers action figures so they can giggle and let their imaginations soar as they re-enact that quaint little occurrence when terrorists launched a major attack on a great nation? (That last bit is my hyperbole as I warmed to the argument, not Michael's contribution.) Anyway, until he pointed this out to me I had never questioned the almost universal presentation of Noah's ark as a cute little children's story, but I thought it bore considering. I'm not going to launch into a great crusade against Noah's ark wall-paper for nurseries or anything, but it does make me stop and consider some of the cultural icons we tend to take for granted.