It took me a while to figure out how to convert the audio file into something that YouTube would recognize, but I finally did it. We, as in Bianca doing the work and me recording it, present Peanut's heartbeat (hearing this was as close to crying as I have gotten so far...I have been pretty stiff upper lippy):



I just noticed that there are at least three other YouTube clips entitled "Peanut's Heartbeat". What a weird coincidence.

So in the exploration of the Baby Industrial Complex or BIC (thanks Ike for the term) I have discovered that apparently that everyone sells not just products, but peace of mind. If I get the Graco imonitor I get peace of mind. If I get the Britmax car seat I get peace of mind. The Baby Bjorn--peace of mind. The Graco Pack n Play--you guessed it--peace of mind.

But here is the weird thing, they have all been selling peace of mind for YEARS, even though according to the recalls and their own literature their current products are VASTLY safer now than before. So are the people that bought the old items in possession of smaller or fewer pieces of peace of mind than those that buy the current offerings?

A friend of mine from work, Steve, has two daughters and he, like me, is a research person. He was intent on finding the very best car seat and bought a Britmax with "side impact" protection. This was for Emily, who is now 5. Last year he had another child, Alice, and again did research. Come to find out, Emily's Britmax had only side impact protection while Alice's now has TRUE side impact protection. So for all of these years Emily has been riding around in FALSE side impact protection and Steve and his wife never knew. When he realized this, did he just lose all of the pieces of peace of mind he gained when he purchased Emily's seat? That is scary.

Then there is this statistic: if you compare JUST SIDS deaths, a baby is roughly FIFTY times more likely to be killed by a crib than a tiger. Estimates place tiger deaths at around 60 a year. SIDS deaths in America alone top out at around 3000 a year. So based on numbers alone a crib is 50 times more dangerous than a tiger if you are a baby. It seems so counterintuitive, what with babies being defenseless and all, while tigers are ravenous clawed carnivores, but the statistics and the BIC just CAN'T be lying.

Based on this information I am now researching tigers for Peanut to sleep on. Perhaps they sell some that come with peace of mind. And if size matters, then how about a liger? That is a LOT of pieces of peace of mind.

Four posts in four days. Yes we got snowed in (again), but we also had THE ultrasound. The rest are me being crazy.

This is the closet project, started and finished in ONE day. It is technically the third project for the baby's room. The first, completed by our skunkworks team, was the wall redo--stripping wall paper, busting down the panels, etc. but since the Peanut plan was still under wraps at the time, that was a TOP SECRET baby project. The second was the redo of the floors and the ceiling fan. Given the amount of swearing by both the laborers on that job (me and Peanut's Rhode Island Grandpa), it is not exactly family friendly. So here is the third project--the closet. Not exactly the Sistine Chapel, but here it is: