Mixed Bag Of Rant

I’d be remiss if I missed on this opportunity to rant about the latest and greatest breastfeeding vs. the evil formula companies debate. 

Let me premise this by saying that I FED MY BABY FORMULA. GASP! SHUDDER!

I’m not going to tell my story again. It has been told. Again and again. I didn’t have a choice but to switch because desperately trying to breastfeed was putting my baby’s life at risk. If your baby’s life was at risk because he needed to fricking eat, wouldn’t you do the same?

I am completely neutral when it comes to breastfeeding. If you can do it, I applaud you. Actually, I ENVY you. So, yay for you. Yay that it worked. Yay Yay Yay. Now, will you please stop shoving it down everyone’s throats and let people make this extremely personal decision on their own without all the guilt and bias getting in the way?

Here’s the new big dumb controversy. Similac was paying Bloggers for their positive reviews of their Similac Baby Journal app. Okay. So that’s nothing new. Bloggers often get paid to promote a product in return for money or goods. What became debatable was there were bloggers who happened to be breastfeeding advocates that are getting paid to write about something that they didn’t necessarily agree with or believe in. THAT I can understandably argue with (pot calling the kettle black much? Stick to your guns on your opinions or you can kiss your blog credibility and your integrity goodbye). As much as I would like to rake in some dough with my blog (I make enough for a medium Caribou coffee about every four months) there is NO WAY I would write a review for a product that I didn’t believe in (click on my About tab and I explain this further). You will never see me flip flopping just to get compensated unless I had a life altering experience with the product which genuinely changed my opinion.

When I first brought Jackson home, I was a disaster. New house, new mom, breasts that refused to work, uterine infection, baby that refused my breasts, baby losing weight quickly, jaundice getting worse, people constantly on my ass telling me I HAD to breastfeed… It was awful and not exactly the dream I had about bringing a baby home. My entire pregnancy, I literally poured over information about breastfeeding. I feel like I was incredibly self-educated and informed on the subject. I barely looked at anything in regards to formula; yet, I kept all of those samples from my OB/Gyn “just in case.” When it got to the point where the choice was very obviously no longer mine, I suddenly had to play catch up and figure out what formula was all about. I wish I had educated myself on it IN THE FIRST PLACE.

I would like to think that I am a smart mom and a smart consumer who makes informed decisions. The pressure to breastfeed from the mom community was SO enormous that I didn’t think I had any other options and let me tell you, that is simply not true. When making the switch to formula, I did not ask Similac, Gerber or Enfamil the best way to do it, which kind would be best for my baby or how often to feed him. I ASKED HIS PEDIATRICIAN. So please do not insult my intelligence- I didn’t choose to formula feed or buy a specific formula product because Enfamil shoved some marketing campaign down my throat. You don’t think Madela has to do some marketing for their breastfeeding products? Hmmmm? Does that make them evil for trying to sell their product? Are they preying on idiot moms who supposedly don’t know any better or don’t have a single clue on what the hell they are doing? Just curious.

Even though the end product for Similac’s baby journal app fell a little short and completely pissed off the breastfeeding community at large, I have to give them a little bit of credit for at least trying. They are at least recognizing that breastfeeding is a big deal for many moms and made an attempt at creating that connection. I took a peek at the app and found the journaling to be easy and straightforward. While I didn’t need an app to tell me when my kid was hungry (yes, even as a formula feeder, I read his hunger cues appropriately), his pediatrician did require us to journal when and how much he was eating as well as his dirty diapers and sleep time for about the first two weeks (they needed this information specifically because he was jaundiced). So in that respect, the app is pretty good. Take the “call our feeding expert” option out of it and I think they may have been on the right track. I would like to think that smart moms are going to go to their lactation specialists and pediatricians for advice on feeding before they rely on their iPhone app. Or maybe that’s just me. I WISH I HAD THIS APP (hell, I wish I had an iPhone) when Jack was born. There are many baby journaling apps out there (type in “Baby Journal” in the search bar in the App Store… you’ll see what I mean), the only difference with this one is that it was made by Similac. A formula company. Gee. I guess it’s evil now.

Here are some snapshots of the app at least of the pieces that I would have found useful way back when Jack was an infant (I think the pee and poop visuals in the diaper change section are kind of hilarious):

Would I endorse this app? Yup. I would. Do I endorse breastfeeding? Yup. Of course. Do I endorse formula? YES. Do I endorse moms whose babies love them regardless of which way they are fed? Absolutely.

FYI: I was not paid a single penny for my opinion.

I receive a lot of flak from people who insist that I am damaging my poor little toddler by letting him play with an iPhone. While I could go into a whole rant about how I disagree (and I have in a past blog post), and for the record, my son is doing just fine.

I’ll show you why:

Just like flash cards, the app he was playing with includes the written word as well as a picture. Before the fruit game, he was doing numbers and letters counting to 30 and doing the ABC’s… Call me crazy but I don’t think he’s getting a mushy brain by playing these games.

Happy Wednesday!

… and I encourage it!

I recently upgraded my phone to an iPhone 4 and little Jack of course inherited my hand-me-down 3G. I wiped it of all of my more adult-centered apps (i.e. social media, restaurant finders, etc.) and it now has his toddler-centric apps only on it as well as a few of his favorite Pixar movies.

I have heard many comments made over whether or not letting a toddler play with an iPhone is just encouraging video games at a much earlier age and “books are so much better.” I don’t disagree with either of these criticisms; however, I feel it is up to parents to monitor exactly what is on these iPhones before letting their toddlers play with them. He doesn’t have just any old games on it. He has games that teach him the alphabet, words, numbers, songs, animals… I could go on and on at how beneficial these games have been! At daycare, he doesn’t have any connection to this type of technology. He spends his days reading, playing outside at recess, doing artwork and participating in dramatic play just to name a few. When he comes home, he is physically tired and we really kind of let him make the decision when he gets home at night in terms of what he’d like to do (to an extent…). Sometimes he plays with toys, sometimes he runs wild but a lot of the time he just sits and chills with his iPhone and plays his “games” before dinner. I certainly don’t feel that he is being damaged. He maybe spends anywhere from 5-30 minutes on it at best and it certainly doesn’t serve as a babysitter. I often ask him questions about what he is playing and for the ABC’s-type apps I ask him to repeat the letters and words rather than just look at them. How does that differ from a Leapster or V-Tech learning system?

Here are some of the apps that Jack has on his iPhone:
Toddler Phone
Little People Farm
Peekaboo Wild (my kid learned to say crocodile from this app at a very early age)
Peekaboo Farm
Baby Flash Cards
Old MacDonald Farm
Animal Show
Animal Sounds
Alphabet
Roundhouse
Speak, Piggy!
ABC’s & Me
iGo Potty
Toddler Zoo

I confess he probably doesn’t need this app, but he laughs at it hysterically (must be a man thing): iToot.

I get so tired of the self-righteous moms out there criticizing things like this. We are still parenting him. We choose when he plays with it, how long he plays with it and what he is exposed to on it. We make sure he is learning something. We are interactive. WE call the shots. I’m sure there is a wrong way to go about it, but I feel pretty confident that we are doing okay.

What is your opinion on toddlers and iPhones? Love ’em or ditch ’em?