I try to read more fiction in August, when it's hot and still (indulge me in my Goop fantasy). I’m reading Mother’s Milk by Edward St. Aubyn and it opens with the most evocative and gut-wrenching fictional description of a baby’s supposed emotions after his birth. I wanted to share part of it here, because I felt some sense of mourning when the baby was birthed, and out of me. I wondered what the baby felt.

In the book, the character Robert has just been born- a traumatic and dangerous surgical birth and his mother is quite paralyzed with fear of what's just happened...

“Suddenly Robert was terrified too. They were not together in the way they used to be, but they still had their helplessness in common. They had been washed up on a wild shore. Too tired to crawl up the beach, they could only loll in the roar and the dazzle of being there. He had to face facts though: they had been separated. He understood now that his mother had already been on the outside. For her this wild shore was a new role, for him it was a new world. “

Sometimes, as my baby gets older and more his own self, I look at him and I think, “do you still feel part of me? Are you already dying to break away from me? When you’re too busy to nurse, as you are so often, I’m so sad because I miss you, but I’m proud of your desire for independence and mastery."

How much do babies know? On the Families and Work Institute’s blog, Amy McCampbell pointed me to a recent study that claims “Even the average dog has the mental abilities of a 2-year-old child...The finding is based on a language development test, revealing average dogs can learn 165 words (similar to a 2-year-old child), including signals and gestures, and dogs in the top 20 percent in intelligence can learn 250 words.”

A dog may “learn” a word, but what comes next? Rote behavior. This story is an example of the media just being nakedly provocative with headlines and leading more parents into anxietyland. As McCampbell notes, ”the newest research shows is that, in fact, there is so much going on in a baby’s brain.  That from the very beginning, babies are unlocking the social, cognitive, and emotional world around them… even if we (the very smart adults around them) can’t see it.”

Alison Gopnik’s New York Times op-ed who notes that indeed, babies know far more than we think they know- but they learn differently than we think too. She writes, “babies can be rational without being goal-oriented,” they learn without a plan. But thankfully, Gopnik says, “There are no perfect toys; there is no magic formula. Parents and other caregivers teach young children by paying attention and interacting with them naturally and, most of all, by just allowing them to play.”

And now, in the small victories category: I think I’ve finally got the travel packing down, and here are my two revelations. One good sized squishy cooler with ice packs, for bottles, breast milk, food jars and the like is essential. Throw out the small one that comes with the breastpump and go larger!  Pack everything that goes into the mouth in the cooler. Also, bring lots of blankets- big, small, etc. You never know when playing on the floor will help you survive a four hour airport delay.

What are your baby travel tips? How many bags do you check, on average, for even an overnight?

Health care: Two words. Barney Frank.
The craziness of the rhetoric flying around has gotten me scared to say
anything more. Despite the fact that two almost octegenarian men very
dear to me have undergone incredibly expensive and--turns out--
unnecessary surgery this week...