If you like pink, October is a good time to shop:  a lot of pink stuff is available for National Breast Cancer Awareness Month.  If you’re like me, you like supporting that cause and also really like the way it justifies a purchase.

Coffee-Mate is offering a pink mug for $12.95; $5.00 is donated.
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My oldest two kids are technically old enough to brush their own teeth now, but they do a crappy job. Our compromise is this: they brush their own teeth in the morning before school (with me calling out from the other room, “Are you getting the BACKS? Get EVERY surface of EVERY tooth please!”), and I brush their teeth for them before bed. And then there are three more kids, so the Toothbrushing Line is a significant chunk of our bedtime routine.

One thing that’s made things easier for me is having the kids LIE DOWN while I brush their teeth. I got this idea from the dentist—not in that he suggested it, but in that I noticed that’s how HE did it. And indeed, it is way superior: the toothpaste doesn’t drizzle down their chins, it’s easier to see the top and back teeth and to get at them, it’s easier for the kids to open their mouths wide, it’s easier to keep their heads still.
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My firstborn, Rob, asked about the facts of life pretty early. He is sort of child we describe as “having an inquiring mind” (we save “OMG, he just BEATS ME DOWN with questions until I can’t stand it another SECOND and have to pretend I need to pee so I can hide in the bathroom for a few minutes!” for later, when he’s asleep) and so I did have to decide what he was ready to hear, but I didn’t have to decide when to bring it up.

My secondborn, Will, is less inquisitive. He is going into second grade next year, and it occurs to me that we haven’t had any kind of Talk yet. Rob knew the basic scoop by now, because of the asking and asking and ASKING, but I suspect Will would just as soon not discuss it.  That makes two of us.

I’m working from scratch here:  I need to decide when to tell Will, and I need to decide HOW.  For Rob, as I said, I started by answering his questions, a method which can be tricky:  it involves trying to figure out what they’re REALLY asking.  Is “the baby starts to grow in a special kind of tummy” a sufficient answer, or is he really asking HOW-how?  Is “in a special kind of tummy” sufficient, or is it time to bring out the word uterus?  And so on.  It’s a topic that doesn’t have one single correct answer for every family, or even necessarily for every child within a family.

When I felt Rob was ready for what I think of as The Basics (bringing out the real words and explaining some mechanics), I used
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I seem to be on a roll recently with disappointing purchases.  One person’s bad purchase can be another person’s good purchase, especially when the problem is with a purely subjective things such as scent or flavor, but it can still be helpful to know what someone else wouldn’t buy again.  I’ll tell you mine, and then you tell me yours and maybe I can get off this roll.

This one was totally my own fault:  I KNOW I don’t like fruit scents.  But I love Consumer Reports, and they rated the Gain Joyful Expressions fabric softener very highly, and Target only had it in Apple Mango Tango scent.  In the washing machine, it smells like apple cider.  After the clothes are dry, the scent reminds me of a faint lingering mildew smell.  It’s a great fabric softener, though, and someone who likes apple-scented stuff would probably love it.  Er, perhaps not after I’ve said it smells like mildew.
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You’ve probably heard of the chemical known as Bisphenol A, which lurks in various water bottles and beverage can liners and other products we regularly put in or near our food-holes. There doesn’t seem to be conclusive proof that this stuff is bad for us, but there’s certainly some worrying information out there.

To be honest, I haven’t spent a whole lot of time stressing over this issue because, I don’t know, I’ve got a finite amount of headspace to devote to the various subjects that freak me right the hell OUT. But I have started thinking about it lately, as I re-evaluated the bottles I’ve been using with my newborn. I used plastic bottles with Riley — I’d never even heard of BPA at that point — and I just figured I’d use the same ones with Dylan, but after warming a bottle for the fiftieth time the other day it occurred to me that I could make a fairly simple consumer choice to eliminate one more kid-related worry. Specifically, the nagging question of whether or not I was POISONING MY BABY with his bottle.

As I consider some of the plastics we use on a regular basis in our house, I’m thinking it wouldn’t hurt to upgrade to a safer alternative. Especially for the things we run through the dishwasher over and over, etc. Here are some of the kid-friendly, non-BPA products I’ve been looking at:

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