Library cards are so very cool.....

Ok so over the past few months I've obviously been trying to read anything I can get my hands on related to pregnancy and child birth. Of course by this point I am almost done reading what to expect when your expecting... and a co-worker had this subscription to Fit pregnancy magazine called Mom and baby and I was afraid it would be a magazine which made me feel completely guilty that I don't work out every day during the pregnancy but it really wasn't that way. It turned out to be a great magazine.

Anyway so now I'm on my next reading assignment ... thats to figure out what baby's first year book I should get. Of course there are so many out there.... the strategy of scoping out books at Barnes and Nobles really was not practical. So in a random moment of inspiration I remembered..... MY LIBRARY CARD... So I dusted off my library card.. which I haven't touched in a while and headed to the library... I should have done this earlier.....they really are such a great resource.... and not only did I get to borrow all these books but they also had videos.

Which was cool b/c while I was reading Harvey Karp's book I could rent the video also (which was nice cause DH really probaby wouldn't have read the book).

Now of course being a first time mother I know very little to nothing about taking care of kids but I do have so say that I found this book fascinating. He talks about how human babies are born early and incredibly helpless compared to other animals and how the babies first three months are incredibly difficult b/c really human babies to be developmentally equivalent would need an additional trimester in the womb and that humans were ejected from the womb early b/c our brains got too big too fit down the birth canal (if they waited three more months). Anyhow... its interesting cause he talks about how primitive cultures are more advanced at taking care of newborns than our western civilized cultures and that we should fall back on some of those things. Especially for the first three months when the baby is adjusting to being outside of the womb.

Anyhow so another "interesting" (ha ha not really) was the Dunston Baby Language video. Apparently this woman had been on Oprah. She found that if you really listen carefully to babies cries there are certain sounds that babies make and that they are asking for specific things like... they need to eat, they need to be burped etc. and more interesting is that all babies regardless of what part of the world they are from or economic class make these noises. Well the concept is interesting but she really didn't need a 2 disk DVD set... she could have portrayed the essence of the baby language concept in like 30-45 minutes. She would share demonstrations of the baby sounds with lengths of footage of babies wailing away.... while you needed it to really get an feel for the sound after a while it was just babies wailing.