This may sound silly, but I get my parenting inspiration from Japanese anime. To be more precise: Card Captor Sakura (in short: CCS). For those who don't know the series: CCS is about Sakura, a little Japanese girl, that has to collect all kinds of magical cards. And those cards are not easy to catch. She has to complete that quest while her ordinary life at home and at school goes on.

So what is the inspiration aspect of it then? Well, although Sakura's certainly doesn't live in a perfect world, she is doing the best she can to make it so. She's always energetic, polite and helpful. She and many other characters in the series share that positive attitude one way or another. The ones that seem to have a more negative attitude (like her brother) also reveal their good character traits sooner or later.

I know that cartoons and certainly CCS does not even remotely reflect real life. But after seeing a few episodes (and I've seen all 70!), you get that infectious positive vibe. That vibe inspires me to create what I see: a positive community. To be more specific: a positive, vibrant family. By having an ideal image in my head, I can draw the inspiration to achieve at least a little bit of the utopian image I get when watching CCS.

Labels: inspiration

Before our baby was born I already read about co-sleeping; letting your child sleep in the parents (in this case: our) bed. This is part of the attachment parenting philosophy, which states that you have to keep your baby as close as possible.

Co-sleeping isn't just applicable for kids, but also for babies. At first we were scared about the possibility of rolling over the baby at sleep. Mainstream Western pediatrics point out to that danger, while in the non-Western world co-sleeping is the standard. To be on the safe side, I didn't want to let the baby sleep in our bed. But in the last month we tried to take a different approach.

We already have our baby in a crib alongside the bed to keep our baby as close as possible. We think that this greatly helps in the bonding. Furthermore: my wife can react fast when our baby starts to cry. But sometimes our little girl just doesn't want to be alone in the crib. Or at least: it seems. Sometimes we can stop her fussing by giving milk, but on some times we seem to have no other option but to put her between us in bed. It will not calm her in an instant, but she will eventually get sleepy and go to Slumberland.

The first time she slept between us, I presumed that my wife would eventually pick up the baby and put her back in the crib. That seems naive, but she has a hard time to go to sleep before the baby does. Well, my wife figured that everything was just fine and didn't re-locate the baby. So you can imagine how surprised I was, when I saw our little girl still in our bed, when I opened my eyes on 4:00h.

Although nothing happened and our baby wasn't squashed by one of us, it didn't feel right. That was a feeling I didn't expect, because co-sleeping still feels like a very tempting thing to do. My wife reassured me about the safety of the situation by telling I was noticeably more aware of the fact that there was a baby next to me. Well, I must say: i can't remember rolling over my wife or slapping her in my sleep, so why would it be different with a baby although it sleeps a bit nearer to me than my wife.

I'm still not sure what's best, but for now I will take the middle way: we will only have our little girl in bed, if there's no other efficient way to make her go to sleep. That is: if singing lullabies and giving breast milk doesn't make her go to sleep, we'll put her in our bed. We will put her back in the crib if we should wake up in the middle of the night, but it's also ok if the three of us keep on sleeping until morning.

So we're not making a habit of it. yet. Our baby is getting older so everyday co-sleeping is getting less and less an issue of safety and more an issue of preference/privacy.

Labels: babies, co-sleeping, newborn, sleeping

Since we had to buy a lot of stuff for our baby, it's only obvious that I have to write reviews about the products we bought. I start my small review series with the most costly purchase of them all: the Gecko-pram made by Bugaboo.

The Gecko made us both happy. My wife wanted a stable pram that could be steered easily and had wheels that run smoothly. Call me a stereotypical man, but I wanted a simple, efficient ergonomic design. We went to a very large shopping center where they only sell baby stuff. We could choose between ±50 different prams. I don't remember the names of all the prams we tried, but I can remember 2 of the 3 different models we had to choose from at the end of our elimination.

The choice was between the Gecko Bugaboo and the Xplory of Stokke. We already knew Stokke as the maker of ergonomic, upscale furniture. We have one rocking chair in our living room. My wife needs ergonomic furniture, so we bought one rocking chair, although they are very pricy. As you may have guessed, the Stokke was the more expensive of the 2. Another drawback was the fact that you couldn't put a Maxi-Cosi in a Xplory. That's not handy when travelling with a car. You have to travel as light-weight as possible. Light-weight travelling should be a rule of thumb for every product anyway.

But the Stokke had some advantages over the Gecko:

• It looks better (design)
• The sitting area in the Xplory is high. That way the baby doesn't see everything on heel level. Because of that, you could also sit on a table, without having to transfer the baby from the Xplory to a baby chair. You just park it in front of the table.
• It had a small, but very easily accessible bag.

But these advantages of the Xplory didn't outweigh the disadvantages, so we chose for the (relatively) cheaper Gecko Bugaboo. And we didn't regretted it. And of course: over time you see more and more Bugaboo's. But that's not just because we have one. Bugaboo is a popular brand in the Netherlands. That shouldn't be much of a suprise, since the company is based in Rotterdam.

Can we say something negative about the Bugaboo? Of course. Nothing is perfect:

• The two buttons to change the position of the handle are not cooperative. that's the only thing that's just not good at all.
• My wife wanted to have a matching bag that could be hung on the Gecko. A girlfriend of us could buy one of those, but apparantly gets misused a lot of time, making the pram tilt and fall. Because of that you cannot buy bags anymore.
• You can hang a bag under the bed between the wheels, but it's hard to reach. if want to put a lot of stuff in it, you have to take the bed of first, before you can reach the bag in an efficient way.

...and in the wild


The Xplory of Stokke

Labels: bugaboo, pram, product reviews

My wife loves, like all mothers, her child very much. Even a tiny bit more than me (understandable, but I always find that a bit disturbing). And just like most parents she hates to hear her baby cry. But she made it a policy: the "no-cry policy". This means that if the baby cries it cries for a reason. So we never leave our baby upstairs crying in her bed for 10 minutes. We always get up immediately and see what's going on.

And if our baby cries, she does that for a reason most of the time. By being there in times of need, my wife hopes to create a better bond of trust between her and our child. To prove her thesis, she occasionally provides me with supporting evidence. The best article she found that describes what she feels is called Letting Baby "Cry-It-Out" Yes, No! on www.askdrsears.com. There are more articles on that page about that subject.

She needs that affirmation, since most of the people she knows just let the baby cry for some time. Especially people of former generations. They had to feed a baby on schedule, even when they were breast feeding. We once heard one older women say that she would crank up the volume of the radio so she would not have to hear her baby cry for milk while it wasn't time to feed yet. That make my wife's no-cry policy an obscure one.

Is the policy perfect? I think not. Though it is much better than letting the baby cry all the time, I see that my wife is losing a lot of time with our 4-months old baby. So the downside is that the control over your own time is a bit more limited, since you have to act on (almost) every yell.

But it's getting better. Our baby has a larger "vocabulary" now than as a newborn. When she was a newborn, there was little time between desire and yelling. By now, she's fussy for some time before she starts to yell for milk. So she kindly gives us a priority to her needs. So we can now finish what we are doing before attending our lovely little girl. Thanks for that! :)

Labels: babies, crying