Book Review: On the Night you were Born by Nancy Tillman

Title: On the Night you were Born

Author: Nancy Tillman

Publisher: Feiwel & Friends; First Edition edition (Oct 17 2006)

Intended Audience: Babies, toddlers, anyone that loves reading children's books

Genre: Children/Baby/Toddler


One sentence that particularly stands out: "On the night you were born, the moon smiled with such wonder that the stars peeked in to see you and the night wind whispered, "Life will never be the same.""

What I loved: The beautiful sentiment expressed throughout the story. Tillman is also the illustrator of the book. She provides illustrations layered with both visual and textual trinkets that are simply breath-taking.

What made me want to cry into my burpee cloth: The last page that utilizes "heaven's trumpets" to further signify the special nature of the child's birth.

How many M's?: MMMMm (4.5/5)

Nancy Tillman is perhaps (if I were forced to choose because there are so many) one of my favourite children's authors. She has authored and illustrated books including Wherever You are My Love Will Find You, Tumford the Terrible and her most recent book: The Crown on Your Head. One of the reasons I love her books so much, is that they encapsulate and translate a very important message to children: that they are loved. Sure we hope that all children are getting this message from a stable source in their lives, but unfortunately this is not always the case. For those children and parents that want to convey in picture and story form just how special their children are, Tillman offers a neat oeuvre of books to do it with. On the Night You Were Born is one of those books.

I must confess, I have an undying love for children's books. Not just those with lovely rich story lines, but ones that have beautifully rendered illustrations. No one needs me to get into how important children's literacy is, so I will save that schpeal for another post . Due to the cost associated with children's books, I'm not always able to just go out and buy them new. So I generally troll community book sales, garage sales, or go to the community library - choosing the ones carefully that I purchase brand new. That being said, after sitting on my book wish list for a few months, I went out and bought On the Night You Were Born. And it was worth every penny.

Although On the Night You Were Born is available for sale and purchase to many readers, it reads as if it was specifically written for each individual child. It tells the story of the night when everything changed in the world, the night that particular child (the reader) was born. Birth, perhaps one of my favourite (or over-discussed) topics, is a special, emotional, raw experience for birth and adoptive parents alike. This book is successful in capturing not only how special and unique each individual child is, but also the sentiments of new parenthood and the emotions and joy that is associated with the moment that you see your child for the first time. All while remaining relatable for children.

The reader gets to read how, upon the birth of the child, the whole world changed. The whole world was joyous:

"So enchanted with you were the wind and the rain that they whispered the sound of your wonderful name."

and the animal kingdom came out to partake in the celebrations:

"When the polar bears heard, they danced until dawn."

While the book maintains a continuous story line, it also has an interactive component that encourages the reader at certain points to take part in the narrative, for example, by "wiggling their toes."

It also comes in a sturdy, durable, board book version! Which is another one of my favourite aspects this book.

Now on to the not-so-favourite parts of the book.

First off, let me start off by saying that I think this book should be read by everyone, adults and children. However, in terms of reading practicality, this book is great for reading to a baby, or a child who is around 5 and up. It had a bit of a lengthy storyline for- say- a 14 month old who is on the go. P absolutely LOVES books, of all sorts, and is very patient to sit down and read through several of them at a time, but I find for us, this narrative is a bit long for him to sit through the whole thing without wanting to move on to other shorter books. For this particular case, there is a recordable story version of the book, or you can also get it on CD.

My only other quam with the book, is the last page. It states that "heaven blew every trumpet and played every horn on the wonderful, marvelous night you were born." Why would I have an issue with that? You might be asking. Well, its simple really - I'm not a fan of religious indoctrination, especially not at such a young impressionable age. That's not to say I have anything against people who are religious, or practicing religions - I feel that ones spirituality is a personal and private thing that should come about when they are old enough to make their own decisions about which religion they want to subscribe to (if any at all).

I think that the narrative of this book does a fabulous job of conveying how special, unique and loved the reader of the book is, without having to bring religion into the mix. I would not however, let this aspect of the book, especially since its only the last page really, discourage me (or anyone else) from reading the book. In our house, we just simply change the line to say "the universe" rather than the heavens - problem solved.

So, go on, go out if you don't already own a copy and pick up On the Night You Were Born - because lets face it - you know you want to.....

Book Review: Parachutes & Kisses by Erica Jong (MMm)

Title: Parachutes & Kisses

Author: Erica Jong

Publisher: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin (reprint 2006)

Intended Audience: Women, people excited by Erica Jong

Genre: Fiction


One sentence that summarizes the author's take on babies/parenting: "Life is risk, she thought. Motherhood is risk too." Also, "children are the periscope of the dead."

What I loved: The narrator's willingness to bare all. Her self-indulgence validates mine.

What made me want to cry into my burpee cloth: Instead of searching for her late grandfather's masterpiece painting, at the end of the book Isadora decides that she is his greatest masterpiece.

How many M's?: MMm (2.5/5)

Erica Jong was one of the premier sex symbols of the 1970s, the Linda Lovelace of the literary world. She wrote Fear of Flying, a brutally honest account of her own -- sorry, her semi-fictional doppelgänger Isadora Wing's -- adventures in sex, marriage, love, and the seeming mutual exclusivity of the three. I enjoy Jong's work because it's so damn honest. Like, describing-the-urge-to-suckle-her-dog damn honest. Her writing is almost plotless, conversational in tone, and often repetitive. It is the mind of all the interesting, impulsive, artistic, ADHD women I know. 

Woman (not Erica Jong) suckling dog

So I was delighted to find Parachutes & Kisses at a used book store in Vancouver. What luck! Not only do I providentially come across a third Isadora Wing novel, but it is about new motherhood. I'd read Fear of Flying while I myself was flitting around Europe in a depressed fugue not unlike her heroine's, and here Erica Jong came crawling back, ready to share the vicissitudes of motherhood by my side. 

Parachutes & Kisses chronicles Isadora Wing/Erica Jong's first year out of a divorce from "Josh," a man she deeply loved and is the father of their three year-old child. Josh is several years younger than Isadora, and much is made of her supposed middle-aged status. In 1984 it was unusual to have a child in your late 30s (just ask my mother, she had me at the ripe old age of 38 in 1984) but 20 (okay, almost 30) years later it seems quaint to worry about such a thing. Over the course of just one generation the average age of childbirth has climbed almost four years. 

About two thirds of the way through the novel, Wing meets another charming young man -- younger, even, than her ex-husband -- and commences an affair of epic proportions. There's a great sex scene, there's a hilarious moment where he swallows one of her diamond-stud earrings ("Oh...to have a life in which brilliant studs did not get nibbled off by brilliant studs."), and there is the classic unearthing of Isadora's insecurities as she throws herself into the abyss of loving someone who can never be her life partner. It's all very fun and interesting but... won't somebody think of the children?

Diamond studs:
$1,199 at Walmart.
That's one expensive, corporate crap, Ms. Jong.

At so many points throughout the book -- which I read while nursing Sweet Baby James -- I paused and thought, but where is her baby? How does she have time for multi-orgasmic sex, working out, fellating her ex-husband, dealing with mucked up finances, shopping for designer dresses, traveling to California, Russia and Venice, and even sitting down to try to write a book? She does it with the help of a series of nannies and occasional visits from the ex. And not without a good dose of mother-guilt. 

"Raising a child and making a living were no easy feats. One always felt divided. One always felt that one's vital organs were being torn apart." (p. 364)

But for the most part, Isadora isn't focused on 'making a living' in this novel. In fact, she finds herself unable to write. She's blocked and -- surprise, surprise -- she needs an exciting sexual relationship with a man to unblock herself. A classic trope. But in all that time Isadora spends discovering herself in the supine position, Isadora's child is suffering from mommy's inability to locate steady, consistent, loving childcare.

"She'd no sooner build an attachment than some catastrophe would intervene... The hot-and-cold-running nannies had been bad enough when Josh was there, but now that he wasn't, poor Amanda was making do as best she could. She held on to her rituals: the bath, the Muppets, the bedtime recital of the day's activities." (p. 163-164)

Pretty Woman:
to find herself, our heroine needs a man

From an outsider's perspective, and even from Isadora's own, it's obvious that her daughter needs more of her mother. This also applies to the book as a whole: its centre shifts from Isadora's commentary on new motherhood in the first half to disjointed escapades with her lover in the second. This plot twist is never really resolved, their relationship left hanging at book's end, their coupling's imminent doom spelled out in the Venetian clouds. 

It's a shame because Isadora is a loving mother and there is true plot-driving frisson in her desire to connect with her daughter. She sees her daughter as an individual and loves her fiercely. I want to be inspired by this bond, not regaled with another episode with the so-called "boy-toy" (as she describes her novel in the book's afterward, written in 2006). I know about romance. I know about sex. That's how I got to have a baby in the first place.

When she does, her comments on motherhood are honest and so apt, even thirty years later. Take for example, 

"When the baby cried, Isadora's breasts leaked. When the baby was brought into the room by the nurse, Isadora roused herself out of a dead sleep and sat up in the waterbed to take the little bundle into her arms. The little rosebud lips latched onto her nipple with a prodigious force -- the primal force of the universe, it seemed. And Isadora would look down on the suckling baby, feeling her womb contract and her eyes fill with tears -- but tears for what, she did not know. Tears for Mandy's future, or her own? Tears for the unknowability of any baby's destiny? Tears for her own changed state? For never again would she go anywhere without thinking of her child; it was almost as if that cut umbilicus, now useless and dried, had ceased to be a physical object and had become a powerful moral one, a matrix in which her whole life was bound -- so that never again would she make any decision just for herself." (p. 153)

Perhaps all this lost opportunity is just a reflection of the times: women educated in the 1970s were soldiering into the workforce in the 1980s. The assumption was that you could do either, but not both, career and motherhood. Maybe, just as the sexual exploits of liberated woman were not seen fit to print before Jong did so, the pain and ecstasy of motherhood was an invisible, untouchable subject. Not so nowadays (cf. um, this blog, and our first book review, Let The Baby Drive).

But every movement has its pioneers and Jong's honesty is such that even her brief forays into the essence of motherhood might still seem shocking now. She writes about the intimate, wordless connection between motherhood and death; about ambivalence toward pregnancy and her "bourgeois ovaries"; about the double-edged sword of having "help" from other people after birth (we need less of it, but we also need more). Who among us doesn't feel a little kinship with the following?

"No longer were Josh and Isadora ever alone. There was a baby nurse. There was a cook. There were all these people supposedly to help, but every one of them was as much a hindrance as a help. The baby nurse ate and ate and ate. She resented Isadora for breast-feeding and she retaliated in the classic baby-nurse manner: "Mrs. Ace," she would say nasally whenever the baby cried, "your milk's not rich enough -- your baby is starving to death." "

Bourgeois ovaries

Jong's work is readable because she terrorizes herself with the same steady hand with which she dissects others. She describes her own shameless infidelities, shameful vulnerabilities, and raw insecurities without stopping to remember that, hey, she's the author and she's in charge of this book. Parachutes & Kisses is like that time you wrote a drunken email to your ex and then decided to cc eighteen million other people, for profit. The Wing/Jong persona is crazy, funny, literary, and very much embodied; in short, I see myself in her. I only hope that I can channel my own version of Jong-craziness into attentive, full-time parenthood.

Product Review: Muddy Buddy Waterproof Overalls by Tuffo

Product Name: Muddy Buddy, designed by Tuffo
Made in: China
Cost: $35
Supposed to be used for: Outdoor mud and dirt escapades, indoor messy craft escapades.
Actually used for: Keeping baby warm, immobile
How many M's: MMMM (4/5)

When I was 17 and pretty sure I wasn't going to have a baby until I was at least 35 ("probably more like 38"), my friends and I used to sit in the Naam restaurant talking about Russian literature and the elusive female orgasm. The Naam is a vegetarian restaurant, a Vancouver landmark that's been around since the 1970s. It was the only all-night place in our neighbourhood.

There's a building across the street from the Naam. One night we realized that there were only men -- but lots of them -- going in and out of it. We looked a little longer and saw two women in high heels leave through a back door, reluctantly drawing the attention of the men loitering outside. The sign on the window said 'Hair Salon' but the shades were always drawn. What we were looking at was surely our very first brothel.

But wait, isn't this supposed to be a review of the Muddy Buddy?

Fast-forward ten years: I'm waiting in line at the Naam with baby on my hip, and I look across the street only to see that the 'Hair Salon' is gone. What's replaced it? 'TJ's The Kiddie Shop'. I kid you not. I couldn't make this sh*t up.

But this time it's a bona fide business, you can tell because there's a bunch of strollers in the window. Also, men are not high-fiving as they drunkenly peel out the door. The next day I decide to check it out, see if they have any outdoorsy type clothes. Now that Sweet Baby James is crawling, there's no reason that he can't crawl around outside -- except that we're in Canada and it's kind of cold and all he owns is pajamas.

I take a gander through the store and fing something that is exactly perfect. A big yellow rain suit. Waterproof coveralls for year-round play, as the package says. It comes in yellow and in pink and is sized by weight. The nice saleswoman tells me they tend to fit large so I put the 2T (29 lb) size back and go for the 18 months (24 lb). She says that's a good idea, that I might find it 'quite voluminous' on my nine month-old.

I take Sweet Baby James to the park nearby and suit him up. It fits perfectly (a little big, with room to grow) and I think it's great: in this Beastie Boys of the '90s meets astronaut suit he'll be free to roam through the soggy grass and brown leaves I remember from my own halcyon days in Tatlow Park.

But SBJ fusses as I put him in the suit. And then he just sits there with his brow furrowed, poking at a single yellow leaf.

I try to tell him that he's free to explore, to crawl, to jump, to walk, even! But like that poor polar bear who'd never had more than a few feet to pace, he can't seem to look beyond the confines of his (yellow polyester) cage.

He was tired that day so I thought maybe he'd like it better another day. But so far, the suit seems to have some kind of demoralizing -- maybe soporific -- effect on the baby. I zip him into it and he struggles and then just sort of... lies there. This is the same baby who tries to crawl and nurse at the same time, whose pre-bed antics include energetic mounting and dismounting of the bed whilst attacking it with an egg beater.

I don't know what it is about the Muddy Buddy that makes him feel this way. Is it the slipperiness (it's polyurethane-coated polyester)? The colour? Or simply its voluminous nature? I don't know. So far I just use it to keep him warm when he's in the sling and we're outside. I figure he'll grow into it.

Other benefits: It has a (huge) elasticized hood with a duck bill brim. It has two front zippers, which is supposed to make it easy to change in and out of. Its seams are sealed and the knees are reinforced. And it comes with its own little bag for you to lose carry the suit around in once it's gotten wet. This is a good, solid product. It doesn't claim to do something it doesn't do. It will keep your baby dry (and possibly depressed).

10 NEW Technologies That Are Changing The Way We Parent, Part I

The world is changing and so are our parenting needs. So we decided to compile a list five new technologies that we just can't live without. Check out Part II next week for the top 5 that we wish would just go away.


1. SensuaLiter tm.

The new Medula SensuaLiter plug-in breast pump takes advantage of the most basic fact of human biology: when lactating women are turned on, they spray milk everywhere. A combination electric pump and vibrator, SensuaLiter relieves stress, brings on the lactation let-down reflex, and breaks boundaries. This product makes sense now that companies have caught up with the times and are offering women paid pump breaks and private, lockable rooms in which to do it. "This has really helped me to continue breastfeeding," said Jenny Laroche, mother of three. "And I don't know how I got through my workday without it."



2. Pooping Turdle.

Green Spot, our very own Pooping Turdle!

This little green fellow puts a smile on any young pooper's face. Let's face it, pooping can be boring. Pooping Turdle sings a song, makes soft grunting noises, and even makes silly jokes ("Don't throw me in there!"). Invented by a mom in Eugene, Oregon, PT is small, lightweight, and easily disguised as a regular toy (just don't leave him on the kitchen table when MIL's come to visit). Make potty-training fun with Pooping Turdle. Because like their website says, It's the small things that make pooping fun.



3. babyfacebook (bfb).

 Everybody knows Mark Zuckerberg is a total douche. What we didn't know was that, just like Justin Beiber, he's fathered a string of illegitimate progeny. While Bieber calls these kids his "friends", Zuckerberg makes it official. This spring he founded babyfacebook (bfb), the invite-only social networking site for newborns. "Because facebook is only available to people over thirteen years of age," says Omar Cohen, manager of facebook corp. public relations, "We developed this network for pre- and pre-er tweens." But unlike 'old person' fb, you can't just sign up -- you have to die and be reincarnated (hello, Steve Jobs). Every child born in a public hospital is given the option of opening a customizable bfb account. "This really takes care of the problem of unwanted contact -- only small children are allowed to access this site," says Cohen. So that means that pedophiles (and skanky pictures) aren't a worry, at least for the first twelve years. Now that expecting parents are getting on the bandwagon we'll never be subject to another "Look at the stick I peed on!" status update again.



4. Manse Mondegreen: Queer as (Old) Folk.

OK so this isn't exactly a new technology, but it's something technology's never done before. We're talking about Manse Mondegreen, the sexy, brooding golden age drama that premiers on NBC this fall. Watch Phyllis, the former stripper-turned-Christian, Douglas her long-time lover (and his severe but hilarious wife), and lovable Henry, who would do anything to get into her pants (or even his own). Manse Mondegreen is a seniors' residence where people lose their minds, their fortunes, their inhibitions -- and eventually their lives. What could be better? It wasn't too long ago that 'My So-Called Life' was canceled because network execs just couldn't get behind a show that was only successful with teenagers. A few Twilight years later, and we've all seen how important these franchises can become. Now the head honchos at NBC are casting their glances up (and up!) the age brackets for their next big thing.



5. Safe Deodorizers.

Odor Out, one of the new baby-scented deoderizers

"You can always tell when you go to someone's house if they've just had a baby," says Josh, a bachelor in his late 20s. "Because it smells really funny, and everyone's wearing bathrobes." Well, there's not much we can do about the bathrobes, but the smell is something everyone could do without. In the past, the only thing to even come close to combatting 'Eau de slight tinge of poop with a whiff of rancid milk and unwashed hair' was the selection of carcinogen-containing deodorizers found on the pharmacy shelf. They made your house smell like pinesol, lavender, and/or detergent. The new breeds (like Odor Out, Baby Breathed On Me, and Snugnose) are not only safer and more effective, they also come in family-friendly scents. There's 'clean new baby' (really just fresh milk), 'clean new mama' (a musky, vanilla-like scent) and 'clean new papa' (gin).


NB: A few of you have emailed me asking where you can get these products. I'm sorry to say (especially about the vibrator/breast pump), but I made them all up. "Yes," said my sister, "but how was I to know? Capitalism be crazy."

Book Review - Let the Baby Drive by Lu Hanessian (MMMM)

Title: Let the Baby Drive: Navigating the Road of New Motherhood

Author: Lu Hanessian

Publisher: St. Martin's Press (May 1, 2004)

Intended Audience: New parents. Mamas.

One sentence that summarizes the author's take on babies/parenting: "Mommy's here. Mommy's always here."

What I loved: It made me feel like I wasn't alone. The stories of her son's development -- the devil's in the details and kids say the darnedest things.

What made me want to cry into my burpee cloth: It's hard to say -- individually, each chapter is funny, poignant, memorable. But together they tend towards melodrama and repetition. Kind of like motherhood itself.

How many M's?: MMMM (4 out of 5)


Let The Baby Drive is a poetic, sometimes rambling account of new motherhood and the ways it stretches, mushes, and ossifies you like a can of play-doh left at the Lost and Found. At times silly, at times salty, Lu Hanessian's book is part compelling memoir, part not-so-compelling musings about parenting in the modern age. Hanessian is smart and perky, the host of Make Room For Baby, a show I probably would never watch. It's just too... perfect-parenty.

We don't have a crib for our baby. Or a changing table. Or a set of matching play-pen (sorry, 'play-yard') sheets to go with the curtains. We're just not those parents. And we don't have a TV, anyway.

But I digress. Let The Baby Drive mixes poignant stories of Hanessian's personal failings as a mother (the time she unwittingly told her 3 year-old she wouldn't be his mommy anymore once he was grown up) with moments of raw emotional vulnerability: "From here on in our hearts are bound to break again and again...", adding a dash of laugh-out-loud hilarity -- like the time her toddler had a terrible nightmare about "ba-ca-ba" (...broccoli) -- for good measure.

It's a readable book. I consumed it over a weekend. But therein lies it's downfall: in such concentrated doses the simple narrative style turns from quirky and conversational to pseudo-philosophical and downright annoying. How else could you describe the appearance of no less than thirty-eight questions in 18 pages? And through the flogging of a particularly tired set of metaphors? Like the following?

I sense that Nicholas is feeling divided as well. He is shifting gears, trying, I assume, to decipher the new geometry. Triangle to square. Does he now feel like a round peg?

Irritations aside, I found her descriptions of early motherhood (when her first son was less than a year old) the most appealing. Her words ring true as she describes the voices in her [my] head, which are the ideas from the outside world, other parents, our own parents; and the deeper, calmer voice from within, the one so easy to drown out in the baby's early months.

This is the voice that tells you he's hungry when everyone else says that's impossible. The voice that tells you to pick him up when no one else seems to have noticed that he's crossed that faint line between laughter and hysteria. But for Hanessian, these voices duel most ferociously in the arena of sleep:

He wakes one morning at 2:30 a.m., flapping his arms before takeoff. At 2:31 a.m., we have a sort of baby-parent summit meeting.

“Nicholas, when it’s dark out, people sleep, and they don’t wake up until it’s light out.”

He puckers his lips and blows me a kiss. He can’t understand the problem. he has just logged eight dreamy hours, and wants to announce it to every piece of living-room furniture. At 2:32 a.m., I explain to him that I am in need of rest in order to have the energy to take care of him. This fool’s logic is met with a strange hissing that sounds like he has let the air out of a party balloon.

She characterizes the conflict as 'Camp Pick Me Up' vs. 'Camp Cry It Out'. And although her descriptions of her son's sleeping patterns (or lack thereof) made me laugh, I was saddened to read about her shame and fear surrounding her son's night wakings. She describes it as, "A very touchy subject for parents...up there with whether to spank, whether mothers should work full-time outside the house. It's as divisive a topic as gun control, abortion or nuclear disarmament."

Say what?

Maybe I'm lucky -- OK, I'm really lucky -- but the fact of a toddler waking up at night is no big deal in my circle. Sweet Baby James sleeps with us, so his night wakings are mercifully short and goal oriented (whine -- roll -- suck -- sleep, repeat); my co-blogger, Sarah, is also an 'Attachment Parent', and Dr. Sears has a whole section in his AP book about why high-needs kids like Hanessian's need less sleep. I'm pretty sure the rest of my friends wouldn't dream of judging me (they will once they have babies, but they don't have babies, yet) and one of my favourite childhood memories is of the time my dad took me to the park to go on the swings -- at 4 am.

So I feel comfortable about my position on sleep, and it wears a little thin when Hanessian and her friends literally lose sleep over theirs. Perhaps it's the things we personally feel least confident about that seem most contentious to us. We seek out judgment because we're not convinced ourselves, and then we feel defensive when another's opinion doesn't match our own...

And yet we need it. We might not always like it, but we need other mothers' help and opinions. Hanessian writes,

I realize how necessary it is to find support. Being a happily married woman, I never expected to feel so alone as a new mother. This, I can see, has little to do with my husband. Somehow, sharing your struggles, confessions, and irrational fears with other mothers can be a kind of a lifeline. There is nothing quite like a little old-fashioned validation from another mother who can listen without judgment, shining a light in otherwise shadowed corners.

And I agree with her -- even with my preternatural nocturnal confidence, I'm the first to tell you that I personally need more mama-friends; and the Sunday Brunch section of this blog is some attempt to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to advice from the maternal set.

To that point, Hanessian is a great parent. She demonstrates a real concern for her kids' needs, and not just from her own perspective. She really tries to get into their heads, to see the world from their point of view. I loved her story about going into her son's preschool class and simply observing the way he was slowly being turned into a social pariah. What's more, she got him out of there and she makes no bones about the school's failings.

I wonder, however, about the appropriateness of categorizing Let the Baby Drive as an Attachment Parenting work. Hanessian's big in the API (Attachment Parenting International) network, acting as a (volunteer? paid?) host for their conferences, and the like. I love API and I support anyone who wants to learn more about Attachment Parenting. I just don't see much of the traditional Attachment in her Parenting book.

What's so AP about forcing the stroller issue when your baby clearly hates it? And what's with the crib? And if she's a dyed in the wool babywearer, why isn't it (aside from a description of a back-ache) a larger factor in her story? It is, after all, one of the most visibly obvious signs of an Attachment Parent -- and it doesn't go unnoticed in public and amongst family and friends. Perhaps Hanessian came to the philosophy of Attachment Parenting after she'd written most of Let The Baby Drive. Or maybe she's just found a good selling point.

In any case, I recommend this book to any new parent who wants someone to make fun of them, without someone actually making fun of them; to people who want to loosen up a little and laugh at themselves while they play with their children. You should pick up this book if you're a new, questioning mother who's looking for a female friend who's ready to spill the beans, even if it's down the front of her shirt.

And then you should give me a call.