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OMG I want the fetus in a jar necklace! I would never be asked to be a PTA volunteer again.

We have a microwave and a Nespresso machine on our counters. Sometimes my husband leaves out a bottle of wine for a while, but that's it.

There's a toaster oven on an open shelf underneath one counter, but this is technically not on the counter.

We cook every day, bake weekly, and have two kids under 5. But even the cabinets mostly only have things on the bottom shelf, and are otherwise empty. I guess we've read too much Escoffier.

In my experience some of the people who believe that dishwashers waste water just don't care that much about dishes being clean. I will never forget the day I was in the kitchen and a relative took a knife that had been used to chop onions, ran it for about two seconds under a squirt of cold water (nope, not even soap), and then moved to put it in our dish drainer. My husband, not a neat freak by any stretch of the imagination, said, "What are you doing?" The response? "Oh, knives don't need washing." At which point he shouted, "Who RAISED you?" and we had to remove him from the room. And then I WASHED that knife. To this day we try to avoid eating at the house of those particular relatives.

Our dishwasher heats its own water to temperatures my hands can't tolerate, and with baby bottles galore, we've never run it empty. I don't worry that we're wasting water.

For sinks that stop up, we've always just unscrewed the S-trap underneath and cleaned it separately--the S gets cleaned with a hose outdoors, and gunk in the straight pipe up to the sink can be scraped out from underneath into the bucket and then flushed away. Since this method completely wipes the pipe it doesn't need to be done more often than every few years (and I have long hair). We replace the gasket on the pipe each time which also cuts the risk of leaks. Some of the newer pipes are designed to be unscrewed this way by hand; you don't even need a wrench.

But this could be handy for a tub, maybe, although we rely primarily on an after-market trap supplement which prevents hair and other stuff from going into the drain in the first place. Calling a plumber to completely clean the tub drain with a real snake and then adding a hair trap seems like a better solution than repeated forays with either zipties or Drano, though. I had a roommate once who'd probably spent hundreds on Drano for years without getting the drain to work right. A $50 plumber's visit resolved the problem in an afternoon without chemical intervention.

Speaking as one of those people whose birth went horribly wrong despite being apparently low risk, I am incredibly glad I chose a hospital birth. I have met only two other women who faced similar situations. One was at home, and didn't make it to the hospital in time, and her daughter was stillborn. The other was at a birthing center, and made it there faster (~5 minutes), and her son is permanently deaf from the trauma, but otherwise fine. And my son is perfectly healthy despite a terrifying no-time-to-spare emergency c-section. I wanted the same happy peaceful birth everyone else wants, but you don't always get to choose how things happen.

I am seeing a midwife for this pregnancy and she will be there at the birth, but it will be at the hospital. Losing a baby isn't something you can take back because you realize you made a mistake later. The systematic reviews of research (one published at Cochrane) on birth say that the hospital is safer, when you compare similar populations, because bad things sometimes happen. It is fine if people want to give birth at home knowing the odds but it makes me crazy that anyone advocates for this as though it were as safe or safer, instead of just more pleasant but higher risk. But I suppose it's the kind of thing that doesn't seem real until it happens to you.

Huh. We named our son Theodore because it's the male variant of my name (Dorothy) and because my husband's name is Matisyahu (which means the same thing in Hebrew). And we have not yet met another kid named Theo in person, although we've heard of them.

We're planning to name our daughter Eleanor after my grandmother, which apparently is too closely related to the now-unacceptable Leonora, but I can't get too excited about this.

The only weird looks we get are from people who think we have some bizarre attachment to the Roosevelts.

In our experience as (working) parents (who don't hire any help except preschool), you pretty much stay as neat as you always were, with a little slippage here and there. We were neat before we were parents and we're neat now. Our son puts his toys away when he's done playing because that's just how we roll around here. He started doing it when he was about six months old because that's what we've always done.

We have friends with kids who are the same way, and we have friends with kids whose houses always look like the picture above. They say the place is messy because they're spending time with the kids, but the truth is they were messy before and they're messy now (but with a socially acceptable excuse). We knew them before kids and we knew them after: They are who are they are. There's nothing wrong with living the way you want to live, but the statement that it's the kids, directly or indirectly, who bear responsibility for the mess seems unfair in all the circumstances we've seen. I wince inside when they say it in front of their kids.

No doubt there are people in the world who can swear on a stack of Bibles that their homes were immaculate before kids and only messy afterwards, but I can't speak to that because I've never met any of them.

davidasposted
The only studies that purport to "debunk" the cancer and heart disease risks of secondhand smoke are those funded by the tobacco industry, including that of Enstrom and Kabat. They have been shown repeatedly to be based on misrepresentation of data and flawed analysis; the BMJ paper by Enstrom in particular is a disgrace because it has no reference group of people who weren't exposed to secondhand smoke, and as a result the entire study sample had similar cancer risks. The NIH and JAMA reports are based on repeated studies on both the state and national level, not the much-maligned 1993 EPA report. If you want to claim that secondhand smoke isn't dangerous, you'll have to come to grips with the medical literature, not just cherry-pick a couple of industry studies. And you will find that the weight of evidence says secondhand smoke is really dangerous, even in relatively small doses.

I was brought up to use sponges, but even after microwaving or boiling, they are bacterial sinks within minutes. We are now committed to dishrags and sometimes change them multiple times in a day, if there is a lot of cooking or toddler mess. They are much cheaper than sponges no matter how you acquire them and because we wash them with other laundry, the maintenance costs are basically zero. Now when I go to other people's houses and see (and worse yet, smell) their sponges I'm kind of nauseated. They are disgusting.

Bonus: It is much easier to clean inside glasses or bottles with a cloth than with a sponge. When I showed my mom, even she changed her sponge-using ways.

I'm with you, happify. I spent all of graduate school with people who treated books as the ultimate status symbol (we're so intellectual!) It got old. There's no reason to hoard books when most of them can be shared. And they are very hard to keep in good condition outside a library where they're regularly aired through use. Some of my colleagues swear up and down how much they love books and couldn't live without them lining every wall to express their values, but the only value I see on display is that they believe in destroying lots of books through neglect.

I found that getting the PhD and a job as a professor resolved any lingering intellectual insecurities, and we keep about 100 books in the house, although I regularly exercise my academic library card (in fact the librarians called in my first year of my appointment to ask whether I really needed all those books, but had the paper citations to show that yes, indeed, I did--at the time it was annoying but now it's funny, plus it got me a seat on the libraries committee). And we go to the public library almost every week; they also know us well.