Attack of the Killer Baby Bottles

"Look, we're trying to have a conversation here. Do you mind?"

"Hey Baby . . . you hang out here often?"

The blue chair above is called a Bumbo Seat, and helps exercise the sit-up muscles and coordination until she's able to sit up on her own. More importantly, it give us another way to change her environment and orientation when she gets bored. Bouncer-playpen-playmat-activity center-couch-recliner-arms, lather, rinse, repeat. OK, so maybe "arms" is actually repeated between each of those entertainment stations. It's very hard not to pick her up when she smiles and flings out those pudgy little arms.

Hannah has outgrown the small bottles (5oz), so we had to venture out to Babies-R-Us to pick up new BPA-free nursers. Not bottles, mind you, but nursers. BPA, in case you missed the latest health scare, is an additive that has been in all plastic baby bottles for several decades, turning us all into drooling mutants shortly after birth. Unfortunately, since we all drank from the same types of bottles, we just look at each other and see fellow drooling mutants, and so didn't notice this alarming threat. Scientists have just recently discovered that mice, when fed a constant diet of shredded baby bottles containing BPA, stop running through the mazes and develop large disfiguring tumors in their stomachs.

To avoid further damage and ensure that our children can run mazes as well as they did back before plastic was invented, the scientists (who couldn't possibly be funded by bottle manufacturers, perish the thought) recommend that we all rush out and buy all new nursers that don't contain BPA. Once all the old bottles are safely entombed in the landfills about this time next year, a new batch of scientists will find that BPA, in moderation, actually stimulates healthy brain cell growth and that parents should buy new BPA-enriched bottles, just not feed the shredded bottles to our children.