No Impact Man, is Colin Beavan, the guy who took on living in NYC with no net environmental impact for one year.  In a recent blog post, Beavan talks about how "the cost of living and leisure time rewards of environmental living are harder to reap if you live within a culture that still prioritizes consumption." Now that he is writing his book, instead of researching, Beavan is feeling a bit guilty about things, including how much time his daughter spends in nursery school:

I've been feeling guilty about this, and never more so than on Friday night at the Hudson River Park. That night, my three-year-old Isabella and I sat on the grass. She pretended to be a teacher at her school and instructed me to be Isabella. At one point, presumably reflecting something that happened at school, she grabbed me by the chin and said, "Isabella, if you don't stop talking you will have to stay in the classroom while everyone else gets to go play in the school yard."

Well, here's the thing. I don't want Isabella to stop talking. I want her to talk and talk and talk. I love when she talks. The best thing I ever hear is, "I want to tell you something, Daddy." What is going on in my life that every day she goes to a place where someone might tell her not to talk?

Penelope Trunk strikes again in a recent blog post, "The hardest part of my job is that everyone lies about parenting."  In the post, Trunk talks about 'Mommy P*rn,'...all those glossy mommy and babe layouts of celebrities:

Take a look at the spread in People magazine of Jennifer Lopez and her one-month-old twins. The photos are so elegant that at first I thought it was a parody. But in fact, it is mommy p*rn: the visual fantasy of what being a working mom could be. And it really could be that, if it weren’t that someone like Jennifer Lopez must have a household full of helpers in order to keep her career on track while she has kids...

Here’s another example of mommy p*rn: Angelina Jolie, and her fifty kids. She has a rule that the nannies (plural, yes, each kid has their own) cannot be photographed holding the kids, because it’s bad for Angelina’s image as a mom. But this is the problem: It looks like these very successful women have it all, even though they don’t.

Then Trunk says she will tell us the truth about parenting:

The New York Times had an interesting article recently, called "Facing Life Without Children When It Isn't a Choice," featuring the personal stories and perspectives of six women.  

One of those women is Pamela Tsigdinos, who struggled with infertility and medical interventions for 10 years, before her and her husband finally decided that they needed to stop trying and accept the fact that they were going to be a family of two. (Adoption wasn't a calling for her and her husband from what I gather.) Here's a snippet from her blog, Coming2Terms, about dropping her dad off at church on Mother's Day:

An hour later I'm dressed and dropping him by the church at the end of our street. Despite his stroke he can, thankfully, still sing. He has a beautiful voice. The choir assembles early so my mother will join him later. We pull up to the curb. I get out of the car to say goodbye. I'm secretly grateful that I won't have to go inside with him.

In the last few minutes of our visit together, he grabs my hand and says haltingly, "You know this is the Mass where they have that awful display. When they ask all the mothers to stand. And all I can do is think of you and those like you and ... "

His eyes tear up. My eyes tear up. Neither of us know what to say next. And then I became a little girl again. I fall into his arms for a hug. He holds me tightly and whispers in my ear, "Goodbye, baby."

Beautiful.  And then there were the comments on this feature on infertility. Uh. Not so beautiful...

Here you go folks, courtesy of Babycenter...the Top 7 Mommy Guilt Trips and why you should stop tripping...

1.  Feeding baby formula

Why you shouldn't feel too guilty? From the CDC:

42 percent of U.S. moms are still nursing at 6 months but only 11 percent are nursing exclusively. And in a BabyCenter poll, 68 percent of moms said their babies had formula in the first six months. In other words, there's a lot of the stuff floating around.

2.  Using TV as a babysitter

Why you shouldn't feel too guilty?  According to two BC experts:

"Using television entertainment as a form of quiet time is perfectly appropriate." The key is moderation. If your child is under 2, keep viewing time to a minimum, and break it into 15-minute chunks. Watch with your child, and pick programs that are appropriate

Ok, here's the deal. I hate to use the word hate, but it's the only word that fits. I hated gym class my entire life. Yep, my entire life, from Kindergarten through grade 12. I think the best thing about going to college was not having to go to gym class anymore.

K-8 was horrible. The teacher would do things like roll a pole out into the middle of the gym floor, like the ones you string volleyball nets on? And then one by one, make us climb up it. While everyone watched. I could never pull up on it at all, and I just stopped trying.  

Then the teacher would pick the two most athletic boys in the class (boys of course), and let them pick their "teams" for the sport du jour. Picking one by one. While everyone watched. Total humiliation. I don't think I was ever dead last, but I was close to it.

I've been buying basically the same list of groceries for months, and the bill just keeps ticking up and up.  Apparently, it's not just in my head; food prices really are on the rise.  

According to a recent NY Times article, food prices in general have been rising, with organic food prices holding, at least for the past year or so.  Well, that's over, according to the article. In many parts of the country, a loaf of organic bread is going for $4.50, a gallon of organic milk over $7, a pound of organic pasta is $3 and a dozen organic eggs $5.

Some reasons:

Organic prices are rising for many of the same reasons affecting conventional food prices: higher fuel costs, rising demand and a tight supply of the grains needed for animal feed and bakery items. In fact, demand for organic wheat, soybeans and corn is so great that farmers are receiving unheard-of prices.

Blame ethanol?

“There has been no new surge of land going into organic,” said Lynn Clarkson, who buys organic grain as president of Clarkson Grain in central Illinois. “We are having to compete with this ethanol juggernaut,” he added, referring to the growing use of field corn for fuel.

Ok, get your betting on here.  Well, not real betting, but make a prediction and then we'll see who wins and give you a big virtual gold medal or something!

Tell us who you think will win:

1.  The Democratic Nomination
2.  The Republican Nomination
3.  The General Election, President

Note, this is not who you want to win, but who you think will win, like if you were betting!

Here are the current odds from Bet USA Live Sports

Hillary Clinton         7-5
John McCain        7-2
Rudy Giuliani        10-1
Mitt Romney        12-1
Mike Huckabee        15-1
John Edwards        40-1
Barack Obama         2-1
Mike Gravel       250-1
Dennis Kucinich        250-1
Ron Paul        50-1
Fred Thompson        50-1
Duncan Hunter       250-1
Al Gore         5-1
Michael Bloomberg 5-1

This is fascinating.  It's a picture of what a family of four in Cleveland ate for one year in the early 1950s.

Click here for an enlarged view.

The Cleveland family shown in the photo below was surrounded by enough food to feed a typical American family of four for a year in the early 1950s. Mr. Czekalinski, the father, earned about $30,000 a year (in today’s dollars) at a Du Pont plant. The family spent more than a quarter of that on food alone ...

You will find items labeled Crisco, Albro, Wheaties, Sunnyfield, Beech-Nut and Jack Frost – but no Coke, Oreos or Doritos. How did this family survive?

See below for the complete grocery list.

Check out how small the cart is, the tons of sugar and shortening and flour and meat but also lots of fruit and veggies.

What do you think MotherTalkers?  Healthier than what we eat now or not?

I admit it.  I watched the recap of the Britney Spears coverage last night.  

It's one thing to read celebrity mags or blogs, following who these folks are dating, what they are wearing. But to watch this desperately ill young woman being dragged out into an ambulance with a helicopter hanging overhead, filming it all, for the world to watch, over and over and over.  Her bewildered, disoriented face, that vacant stare. Her small children being taken away by court monitors.

Many people would say, well, when we watch it, we give the media what they want, ratings, money. So, that's what we get, more of this. But where's the line? What is "too much" to show?  When is it so sad that even the media will say, THIS, THIS, we won't show?

A young woman who is afflicted with mental illness, addiction, a combo of the two, possibly dying right in front of our eyes on the television. And what is it to the big media folks? Cash.  Money.  Dollars. I often wonder, will they finally be happy if she dies? What a windfall that will be.  But then it will be over. They'll have to find someone else to follow, to embarrass, to degrade, to call fat when she tries to resurrect her career on stage in front of millions while battling her demons.

And they will.  

I guess it's true, we really have to stop watching it, stop giving them their bucks. Because they certainly won't stop showing it.

I'm sure you've all heard about the tiger at the San Francisco Zoo that recently escaped and killed a teenager.  According to the director of the zoo today, the wall height around the 300-lb tigers enclosure was only 12.5 feet, well below the recommended 16.4 feet.  This tiger had a history of, well, acting like a tiger and there are reports that she had injured a worker's arm during feeding.

Clearly, someone is at fault here, and it's a human.  No matter what, the tiger should not have been able to escape, for both the safety of the visitors and for the safety of the tiger.  Who has now paid the price too.

I'm not a big fan of zoos.

Amy Tuteur takes on the homebirth advocacy groups on her website, Homebirth Debate.  Tuteur, a trained OB, is unabashedly against homebirth and cites many statistics to prove that homebirth is more dangerous than a hospital birth.  Tuteur really digs down into the statistics to prove her points. She then spends tons of time rebutting the comments and arguing with the pro-homebirth crowd.

Anyway, Tuteur has an interesting slide show on her blog, called the Risk Quiz.  Tuteur believes that the homebirth advocacy side puts out erroneous information on the safety of homebirth.

Here is a sample of questions:

1.  True or False?  Studies show that homebirth is as safe as hospital birth for most women.

2.  Arrange the following events in order of risk of death from highest risk to lowest risk:  Trial of labor, epidural, vaginal breech, c-section

3.  In the last 100 years, modern obstetrics has reduced materal mortality by how much?  Choices:  0.5%, 5%, 50%, 90%, 99%

4.  True or False? Birth is inherently safe.

5.  True or False?  If birth weren't safe, we would not have survived as a species.

See the answers below the fold...

We are in the process of moving. When I say process, I mean p-r-o-c-e-s-s.  My husband got a new job, two hours north of our old town, in the same area as my mom (yippee!). We sold our home and now we are in an apartment. It's very nice, new, all furnished, full kitchen, linens, so all we had to bring was ourselves and what we need for the foreseeable future until we find a home, the rest went to storage.

So, now we are house hunting among talk of "Buyer's Market!"  On the ground it doesn't feel that way. We're looking at houses that are still listed at pretty much peak prices, while reading all of these dour forecasts that housing prices are going to tank over the next 2, 5, 10 years. The houses that are on the market in the town we like have been on there forever. But their list prices have hardly budged.  Are sellers delusional? Are they just hoping things pick up in the spring? Stubborn? Who knows.

Media reports like this don't help:

Housing woes have domino effect
There's going to be a lot of pain
Jersey joins nation in worsening housing slump

What do you see where you live? Are we really headed towards a market crash? Should we stay in this rental until it happens?