Clever stuff...

There is a very ripe market out there for clever baby “stuff”. Most of this stuff is decidedly just crafty marketing aimed at the desperate, naïve or otherwise susceptible new parent. I am, for the most part, pretty anti baby stuff for myriad reasons not the least of which being we have a small house and a finite amount of money to spend. I must admit however that Evie and I have encountered a pretty darn cool item that some ingenious parent out there invented. It definitely falls into the useless baby stuff category but heck sometimes you just have to indulge your inner consumerist... I am not even sure what exactly it is called but it is essentially a pacifier with a net at the end of it that you can put stuff in.

This amazing device came to my attention by way of our nanny, Nicole, who commented that it might be a cool thing for Evie because she likes so much to suck on ice cubes wrapped in washcloths. An ice cube in a washcloth is really quite nice and low tech but requires constant supervision, as I am sure some smart parent out there realized, and voila the net-pacifier-thingy was born and millions (or at least thousands) of dollars were made.

Anyway last Friday I had a flex day and my mom graciously came down to Tucson with a really cool highchair for Genevieve (it is in the background of the pictures). I had mentioned this invention to her earlier in the week and she picked one up for Evie in Phoenix and brought it along with the highchair. We started out with an ice cube, which was nice and all, but I think a large part of having a baby is a great excuse to make a terrible mess, so we nudged it up a notch and gave her frozen mango. Of course she thought this was the best thing since sliced bread (or would have if she knew what sliced bread was) and for the first time ever protested when we took it away from her to put in more mango. Since my mom was here I have taken it up another level and yesterday after a stressful day, (Nicole’s poor daughter is sick so I had to spend ½ my work day with Evie with me at work…. which actually worked surprisingly well… in that I was able to get something done) I decided to give her some frozen blueberries to try in an effort to amuse both of us. Ohhh the beautiful mess!!