Little Sinners

Yes, it’s another product review.  I just honestly have been so impressed by this bouncer that I had to share.   Someday I’m going to write an entry about pacifiers and breastfeeding, too, and then I think I’ll be all product-ed out.

Fisher Price makes “rockers” that convert from a stationary bouncer to a sort of rocking chair for toddlers.  This is what I asked for, and received, at the baby shower for our first child, and I’ve been very happy with it—it has made it through three children (often more than one at once) with aplomb.  It’s still going strong.  I had another bouncer, a much cheaper second-hand item, that I kept on the other floor, though, and it was biting the dust.

I should perhaps add here that I’m not a fan of swings.  A baby that’s happy in a bouncer will be equally happy on a pile of blankets at someone else’s house, or in a carseat; a baby that’s happy in a swing will be happy… in a swing. That’s my experience, anyway, and so this time around we aimed our two swings at the dumpster and decided to invest in a second bouncer instead.

I seriously considered getting a second one exactly like the first, but then I saw this one.  It’s a little more expensive, maybe simply because it’s newer, but I loved the idea that the toy bar swung out of the way, and also that the bouncer itself folds up for easy transport and small storage.  I was a little worried about its plastic construction—the cheaper bouncer-rocker is made out of metal—but it’s still rated for forty pounds, which means it can still easily handle our toddlers if they rebelliously venture into it. It’s also a little more matchy with our living room than the blue one is.

So I ordered it, sight unseen, and very excitedly pulled it out of the box and put it together.  We love it.  Baby and I, I mean.  What you can’t really tell from the picture is that it’s very broad.  It doesn’t seem to take up more floorspace than the other bouncers I’ve used, but it’s a lot more bed-like and supportive.  It has a pretty good range of tilt to the seat, too.  It’s also a lot more sturdy than I expected it to be, and the legs work well.  You can definitely drag it across the floor without the legs folding under, but it also has enough grippiness that it stays still when one of the girls knocks into it.  The toy bar folding away is every bit as convenient as I hoped it would be, and honestly I’m kind of glad that it doesn’t make a lot of noise like most bouncer bars!  (It doesn’t make any noise at all, in fact.)  The toy creatures are a little frightening—child the eldest asked why the bugs had so many eyes—but bright and colorful and positioned at a good height.  The whole thing is a little brighter than it looks in the pictures, honestly, which is one of the few negatives since I was hoping it would blend with our décor.  Also not obvious from the pictures is that the bouncer is quite low to the floor, much more than the other bouncer-rocker.  This too is a good thing with toddlers around the house: it would be really hard for them to purposefully or accidentally knock the bouncer over, but it’s still high enough and sturdy enough that they’re unlikely to fall into the bouncer the way they do with a regular, close-to-the-floor bouncer.  (Our first daughter occasionally flipped over her sister’s bouncer—happily I caught it and no damage was ever done to said sister—it was scary, though!)

In short, this is the perfect bouncer to have around when you have two under two, or three under three.

(a swaddled, newborn E)

So, I’ve had three little babies so far, and swaddled all of them to varying extents.  I’ve done blanket swaddles, which always make me nervous because it’s a blanket, which everyone knows you’re not supposed to have within 10 feet of a newborn, but I’ve mostly used the different swaddling products.

First up, we have the SwaddleMe, which was all I’d heard of or seen in stores when our first daughter was born.  We thought it worked just fine, but then other swaddlers came out and I began to wonder.  There are three main points I think it’s important to make about the SwaddleMe: 1) it’s a pain with a newborn, because you have to unswaddle to change their diaper.  Not something I want to do in the middle of the night.  2) the different fabrics result in very different swaddles. The bamboo is the stretchiest one I’ve used, and consequently works the least well—although it is very nicely lightweight.  The cotton one seems the stiffest and best overall, but I’m currently using the fleece and that is working okay as well.  Lastly, 3) you have to swaddle tightly to have a tight swaddle. I’m convinced this is where the “but my baby wiggles out of it” negative reviews come from.  I don’t just wrap the baby up like I’m trying to keep it warm, I wrap it up like I’m squeezing all the life out.  (And, obviously, I check to make sure that I’m not really accomplishing that!)  None of my three children has ever, a single time, come out of their SwaddleMe.  Their arms don’t escape, and they certainly don’t end up near their face.

I’m still a fan, in other words.

But what about those newer, better swaddlers?  First up is the infinitely expensive Woombie, but let me conflate it with what I presume is a total imitation product, the Swaddlepod.  They’re more or less identical, except the Swaddlepod has a zipper closure I like much, much better (the top zipper disappears under a tiny flap, with MUCH less bulk than the Woombie’s velcro-over-zipper at the top), and the Woombie definitely has less stretch (which is a good thing).  I find both these swaddlers to be great for newborns, because they make it a breeze to change diapers in the middle of the night.  It’s worth it just for that.  I like the Swaddlepod better, thanks in no small part to its lovely price tag.  They’re also much cooler than even the lightest SwaddleMe, because there are so few layers.  But my son wiggled out of them before he was even two months old. The swaddle is just not tight enough.  It got to where every night his hands were stuck up through the neck hole, and they woke him up. So back to the old SwaddleMe we went, and since he makes it through the night without a diaper change now, Mommy and baby are both sleeping much better.

There’s yet another type of swaddler on the market, made by the same company as the SwaddleMe, which seems to be the best of both worlds: a bottom-opening zipper matched with the custom fit of the SwaddleMe’s arm-like wrapping.  I haven’t tried it yet, and it only comes in larger sizes, unfortunately.  But if they made it for newborns, it’d be just about perfect.  Until then, I’ll keep using a Woombie/Swaddlepod-like wrap while the nighttime changes persist, then switch back to the old standby SwaddleMe (I have a bajillion of them in the baby closet anyway!).

I’m very sorry to say that the first time I read the Elsie Dinsmore books was just this summer.  I say “sorry,” because I rather would have liked the experience of reading them as a child, along with Anne Shirley, Laura Ingalls, and Jo March—the Elsie stories are so very similar to these which I’ve known so much longer, and yet very significantly different.

Little Miss Elsie Dinsmore is eight years old when her series opens, and she finds herself in dire circumstances: her mother has died, her father is gallivanting around Europe having never met his little daughter, and she finds herself in her grandparents’ rather hostile home, with a grandmother who dislikes her, a grandfather who is fairer but still prefers his own children (who are Elsie’s age), a schoolteacher who is cruel to her specifically, and a horde of fellow-children aunts and uncles who torment her.

At this point Anne Shirley is escaping into her elaborate world of make-believe and wishing for parents while quoting Tennyson.  Elsie, on the other hand, is busy praying for the salvation of her heathen companions, quoting Scripture, and bemoaning her own imperfections in responding to the persecution that surrounds her.

Finally Elsie’s father returns from Europe, and in some ways her life gradually improves—he takes up for his daughter against his siblings and parents—but then Elsie’s in for the darkest days of her life when her father (who is not a Christian), who insists on always being obeyed, asks her to do something she thinks is wrong.  The resulting battle of wills between an eight-year-old and her father is fascinating and horrible to read.

The story ends happily, as every believer’s story eventually does, but not before trekking through adolescence, romance, marriage, and children; the Civil War, slavery, criminals, and business ethics; and the ways little girls should choose their friends and the influence friends and companions can have over us.

In short, these are books full of endless thought-provoking dilemmas and assertions by the main characters, who are relentlessly portrayed as flawed and fallen humans.  The books have one very major (although rarely surfacing) flaw in their treatment of race; the Union is subtly presented as the “right” side in the War, but the issue lacks some of the clarity we could wish for, and at one point Elsie assures her slaves that they’ll be white in heaven, which was really jarring, to say the least!  Theologically the main thing that stuck out to me was Elsie’s obsession with observing the Sabbath in a way that we certainly wouldn’t hold to today; I don’t know enough about the time period to know if her strictness would have been more appropriate back then,  but especially since the Sabbath was the heart of the issue Elsie had with her father in the first book (i.e., I agreed more with her father when clearly the authorial intention was to agree with Elsie) this was a hard issue to ignore.  I honestly couldn’t tell on my first read-through whether the books were Reformed or not—they were kind of like A.W. Tozer that way!

Lastly, it’s difficult not to find Elsie’s very goodness a literary flaw: what eight-year-old could ever be that holy and consistent?  And she does come off at first glance as a goody-goody.  But the more I think about it, and especially in these many weeks since I first read the books, I’m becoming convinced that this isn’t a flaw at all: rather, it’s a deep illustration of how very different Christianity and Christian lives should be from secular.  One of the major themes of the Elsie books is the difference between being moral people and being true believers, and it strikes me that, as believers, we really should be a little more reserved in our praise of books like Anne of Green Gables and Little Women.  I’m the first to admit their artistic superiority, but I think they invite us to confuse morality and common values of bygone years with spirituality.  Anne and Jo’s behavior really should perplex us; both girls, however brilliant and intoxicatingly fascinating, were clearly on their fictional way to a fictional version of Hell.  Let’s not miss the full impact of that.

Someone wrote an overview of the Elsie books that pull out some of her “virtues”  and make an instructive book out of them.  I haven’t read it and I have no plans to—but isn’t it significant that it’s even possible to do that?  And have the resulting book be not only about what is “kind” and “moral” and “good citizenship,” but about what’s biblical and what pleases God?  I could read some pretty boring books (and the Elsie ones aren’t boring!) for that kind of trade-off in quality that goes far beyond the surface.

So, stop reading my blog and go check them out.  :)  Here’s the first book online.