And in important late-breaking news...I fit into my size 8 Gap khakis! OK, it's a tight squeeze, but not extremely tight.

I feel idiotic even writing the above as though it were news considering the *real* news, specifically the horrifying we've-just-opened-the-gates-of-hell news coming out of the Middle East, but you know, I'm not going to go there in this journal. I've done other journals about current news and politics, *this* one is about being a mom. Pure and simple. Let me just say that Bush had better not be re-elected, or I fear that my beloved baby son won't have much of a future. The environment will be irreversibly degraded, corporations will rule the world (without even bothering to hide it), and the entire world will hate us. Oh, they already do. Yikes.

By the way, with all the crazy gun nuts out there, won't one of them please take out Ralph Nader? What is UP with that guy? Ok, back to mom stuff now. No more politics.

Actually, I can transition out of that with the following story... Julian was watching a Baby Einstein video the other day while I was brushing my teeth and washing my face. Sure, I know the end of the video shows the nice mom watching the video WITH her child, but come on...I'll bet 99.99999% of parents who buy that video plunk their babies down in front of it to buy tooth-brushing or meal-preparation time...SOME kind of choring to be done while baby watches various toys flash by on the screen to bad MIDI tunes that are reminiscent of some famous composer.

I started folding laundry upstairs and lost track of time. The video only lasts 25 minutes or so, a mere split second in choring time. When a video ends, the regular TV comes back on. So to my horror I came downstairs and my 9-week old boy was watching the latest news from Iraq...a series of explosions, Marines with guns, Iraqi crowds chanting for death to America, smoke billowing out of destroyed homes, the works. Horrible! I'm sure I just scarred him for life. And he was totally staring at the screen transfixed too. Ugh.

That was definitely worse than last week's fiasco, where I was changing the sheets upstairs, lost track of time, and came downstairs to find the Baby Einstein video had ended a few minutes back and Julian was eagerly watching the latest Avril Lavigne video on MTV. What made it even more embarrassing is that the guys who are tiling our patio had arrived in the meantime through our back gate. They looked through the sliding glass door, I'm sure, and it must have been a chilling sight...the innocent baby plunked down all alone to watch MTV while his slattern of a mother is MIA. Awful, just awful.

I'm not really a fan of Baby Einstein videos so far. They're certainly better than CNN or MTV, but I just don't buy the whole "it makes your baby smarter" thing. Smarter than if they sat in a room staring at a blank wall maybe. If it were actual people playing musical instruments, or real animals, I would be fine with it. But it's really just a series of shots of different toys. Toy animals. Toy trains. Toy musical instruments (that no one plays, they just appear on screen). It's like an ad for toys, they even list all the different toy manufacturers at the end of the video. OK, there's the occasional flower or candle, but otherwise it's all just toy porn. Oooohhh, look at THAT toy, kids! I mean, half the toy musical instruments hardly even look like the real trumpet or piano or whatever it is they are supposed to be. The animals *sort* of look like their real-life counterparts, but not really. It's like a weird parallel universe in primary colors.

Lately I've been plunking Julian down in his Gymini to actually PLAY with a toy rather than just looking at a series of them on a TV screen, and I play opera arias for him while he bats at the dangling giraffe's multicolored feet. I figure that has to be better than watching 2D images of toys while listening to crappy MIDI music. And it keeps him absolutely entranced for 45 minutes or so. He is much better at batting with his left hand than with his right, but I think that's just because he's had much more practice with the left, that's where the giraffe was before I moved it around to his right.

Not that I'm worried at all, he's technically not supposed to be able to bat at toys for another month or so, so he's already way ahead of the game. My boy :-)

I read the other day that in parts of western Africa most of the babies ride in slings on their mother's backs. Newborn's heads are not typically supported at all, they just bobble around, and this bobbling is something fierce when they are riding in a sling on the back of a walking person. (My friend Elisabeth mentioned the bobbling baby heads that she saw in Africa too recently, an interesting coincidence.) Anyways, the bobbling, though it looks absolutely horrifying to us, apparently does no harm whatsoever to the baby. In fact, those babies tend to gain head and neck control many weeks earlier than American babies do, for the simple fact that the bobbling makes them start working their neck muscles a lot sooner. The other thing that those mothers do is swing the babies up onto their backs by one of the baby's arms, which also looks terrible but does no harm.

I noticed with Julian that he has really good head control and has had it for a long time now, since he was about 4-5 weeks old. People have marvelled at how well he can hold his head up. Apparently this is something that he should just be mastering now, at around 8-9 weeks? No, don't worry, I haven't been swinging him around by one arm or letting his head bobble all over without any support, but I don't handle him like a fragile doll. I'm certainly *careful* with him, but I turn him sideways to get him into the car, I lift him off the changing table without fully supporting his head, and when he rides in his sling his head does indeed bobble a little tiny bit when I walk. Not a lot, but he has to hold it up and work his neck, back and abdominal muscles, as opposed to being strapped into a car seat and just being a blob.

I'm not sure why people are so overly careful with babies though. They're only completely floppy for a very little while, and Julian was always wanting to work at holding his head up, pushing with his arms, standing on his legs, etc. For several weeks all I did was change him from one position to the next, and one of his favorites we called "climbing the mountain"...I would bend my knees and put him on my thighs with his face looking over the tops of my knees, and he would try to crawl over them. Of course, he wouldn't get anywhere, but he certainly tried his best and found it great fun. He has always been a big fan of being moved around a lot. Definitely not a baby who sits strapped in a car seat all day long.

Now Julian loves to be held under his arms while bearing his full weight on his legs and waving his arms around, and he loves to be held against my chest as he looks over my shoulder. He always tries to slip sideways in that position so that he has to cling on like a little monkey, but that is too hard on my arm and shoulder, so we don't do it too often. Anyways, this kid is strong, and I think it's because I let him actually do a little work from time to time. He gets that Gymini workout too, beating the hell out of the giraffe. He loves that. And kicking his legs like crazy on the changing table while staring at his mobile, another favorite. You can watch the video of that below.

I hear from a lot of moms that their baby has a flat head from being on his/her back all day...which amazes me. Julian always wants to be up and doing something, rarely is he on his back. Only if we're actually in the car going somewhere is he in his car seat. Otherwise he's being carried in my arms or in a sling (no head pressure). Oh, he sits in his bouncy seat, but that's kind of a sitting up position. He likes to sit up. He's not really a fan of reclining unless he's being nursed, or if there is something interesting to look at overhead. He sleeps mostly on his side, only sometimes on his back. So what's up with the flat heads? Do I just have a vertically-oriented baby? There's no way he would ever allow me to keep him on his back all day. Maybe if I just ignored his cries?

So back to the newsflash, yes, I am wearing size 8 pants. They are tight, but I am wearing them. Just a month ago I couldn't fit in the size 10 pants, now I can wear size 8! Strangely enough, I have barely lost a pound. Maybe 5 pounds total at most. But I have lost a lot of inches. I guess I am replacing postpartum fat with muscle. I'm so glad I am doing Baby Boot Camp! Obviously it is making a huge difference. I noticed today that I can actually *run* up this one hill with the stroller...two weeks ago I could barely even walk up it without feeling like I was going to die. Rock on! The human body is remarkable.