Upselling Myself

I’ve been delinquent in my quest for a mattress for the Peanut’s crib.  We lucked out when a friend of S’s gave us a crib and mattress.  The crib is in the nursery (fancy name for his bedroom). The mattress we gave to S’s mom so she could use it in the crib she put in S’s room there.  We’d use a new mattress for the Peanut’s regular use.

Crib mattresses range from:

•  super inexpensive $60 things, 
• $150 Beautyrest pocket coil types (you know, incase someone throws a bowling ball on the bed while he’s sleeping)
• $170 – $300 ones that focus on the words “health” or “eco” or “nature”
• $400 ones that are “organic”.
• incredibly expensive ones that are made entirely of rubber cultivated by vegan gnomes in a hidden happy land. 

It’s confounding…

• Does organic really matter?  Considering the toxic load he’s exposed to any given day, does a little bit more toxic material make any difference?  Can’t we just let it off-gas for a couple of weeks and put on an organic buffer between him and the supposed SIDS inducing cancer-bed? 
• Firmness is key for SIDS, but what about comfort?  Which ones are firm but horrid (baby gets no sleep) vs firm but comfy (baby gets sleep = we get sleep)?
• Waterproof makes sense to me, although some people advocate the wool or cotton wrapped ones without any plastic, nylon or vinyl (because these are materials of the devil).  But wouldn’t you just end up buying a mattress pad with a waterproof backing made of… plastic, nylon or vinyl? Or of some cloth treated with something that will eventually wear off?
• Infant only or infant on one side and flip it to the other for toddler age?

S and I recently bought a new mattress for our own use – it was on sale (but there are always mattresses on sale somewhere, at least for adults).  It’s fabulous so far.  We’re loving it.  But it reeked of chemicals for at least a month after we got it.  Reeked!

Thoughts of the Peanut experiencing a similar month don’t sit well with me.  Maybe if I had bought a crib mattress months ago, any off-gassing would be done by now.  But I didn’t.  Plus, the more I think about indoor air quality and asthma, allergies etc. – maybe reducing VOCs and other toxins whenever it occurs to me is a good idea.  And even if you let it off-gas to the point where it doesn’t stink anymore, it still contains toxic chemicals mere millimeters away from a sleeping baby’s nose (you know, when they’re old enough to roll over on their own).

Now the question is, how much do you have to spend to get a mattress that doesn’t have harmful chemicals (or, at least, has much less harmful chemicals)?

The $170 mattresses (at Sears.  They’re much more expensive at baby stores) that use “natural” , “health”, or “eco” in their names seem to just be a slightly modified regular mattress with a removable cover made of organic material — with all the  “no PVC, pthalates, bisphenol A”  language pertaining to the cover only.  They have soy-based core and some have memory foam on the toddler side.  These are largely polyurethane (when I was reading about soy-based foam used in sofas, it turned out that less than half the foam ingredient was soy, with the rest being traditional polyurethane). And polyurethane, being highly flammable, requires lots of toxic flame retardants.

For $300 you get a fancier sounding version of the same thing. An innerspring mattress with “natural” soy-based foam, hypoallergenic latex (I thought latex was an allergen? I guess it’s hypoallergenic in that it doesn’t make a nice home for dustmites etc) and a bamboo cover treated with crypton green technology (yes, crypton green technology).

For either of these price points, the description of the mattress seems to be heavy on style and catch-phrases, low on substantive detail.  And I’m all about the substantive detail, baby.

And for $400 you get an innerspring mattress made with organic cotton, and covered with polyethylene (food grade plastic).  Yes – evil plastic, but non-toxic plastic.  And wrapping something in plastic takes care of the waterproof issue as well as the dust mite issue. Most reviews say it’s quite comfortable, and it gets a lot of reviews – which make me wonder if there’s a marketing machine behind it all.  But the website clarifies what it does contain, and what it does not contain, and describes the non-toxic flame retardant used. 

So, it looks like my choices are $170 for a slighlty less toxic mattress (or $300 for something similar with crypton green technology.  Ha – I just love saying “crypton green technology”.  I also like saying “retardant”), or $400 for something that might actually be the real deal and provide significantly less toxic crap (presuming that less toxic = good).

Hmmm maybe it’s going to be a $400 mattress for our boy.  For the 2 or so years he’ll sleep on it. 

As luck would have it, we still have some cash given to use as shower gifts (yay family and friends!)  that can be put to good use on the mattress.

Airmiles

I MUST remember to check airmiles.ca before I buy things online.  Purchases from Chapters.ca and Amazon.ca can earn airmiles, and so can purchases from Apple.  I just bought a little MacBook  — but I did it directly from Apple.  Turns out I could have earned 90 or so airmiles if I had only thought to access the Apple store from airmilesshops.ca. 

Rats.  

And here I am over 200 miles short of being able to pick up a KitchenAid Stand Mixer 90th anniversary edition in Candy Apple Red .  Ah well, it would just take up valuable counter space anyway.

Birth Registration

We registered the Peanut’s birth online.  Isn’t technology great? ServiceOntario’s site required that both parents be at the computer so they could both check off the appropriate boxes attesting to the veracity of the information entered on the form. And because I’m a little rule-follower, I kept reading to S what I was entering as well as all the legal boilerplate.  Lucky for me she found this all to be cute, not annoying.

Much earlier, when we had been negotiating with a known donor, we decided that our child would have my last name.  S and the donor would have biology on their side, but I’d have the name.  Let ‘em figure out who the “real” mother is now!!  But once we moved to an anonymous (ID release) donor, it didn’t seem as important to me to have the same last name as our child any more. 

So here I was registering his birth and I asked “are you sure about the last name?”  The urgency I felt to carve out a niche for myself feels pretty non-existant right one.  One reason could be that I’m the “Other Parent” on the birth registration form (with S’s permission, of course). Another could be that I no longer feel the threat of people considering a known donor to be the other parent.  Another could be that no one has challenged my parenthood yet.  The midwives have been great, our families and friends and colleagues are great.  Even the OBGYN seemed to assume I’d be cutting the cord at the birth (which I did– and, for the record, I cried).

But yes, S was sure that our baby should have my last name.  And now he does.  I’m a father in every sense except for the gender bit. 

S’s mom put a birth announcement in her local paper.  And there it was – his first name and my last name (and his super cute picture).  It looked so strange for some reason – my last name instead of his (as though he would arrive as part of a kit including a name). I suppose one reason for the strangeness was because it looked so short – I was used to telling people the full name including the middle. But seeing the last name, and thinking about the importance we put on that name reminded me of when I got a divorce and my ex-husband demanded I stop using his last name. This was fine with me, since I was ambivalent about having assumed it in the first place.  But the fact that he was demanding it was weird. “I want my name back”, like it was chattel or had value.  At that time I thought to myself  “do I go back to my own last name — which is simply a name belonging to yet another man — or do I come up with one of my own?  Or just go by Lynn X”. What does it mean to carry a man’s name your whole life?  When do you become your own person?  When does a woman stop being chattel?  In the end, I chose to continue to use the name I was given at birth.  Because it was my name, after all.  I lay claim to all of it. And also because, let’s face it,  I had begun to really overanalyse the whole thing.

So now the Peanut has been given his name.  And at first it looked to me like his first name was his but the last name was mine.  But instead of starting that whole overanalysing thing, I will view the names as all being his.  He can lay claim to all of it.

H1N1 Vaccine

There’s a lot of panic related to this vaccine.  It’d kind of strange, really.  It seemed initially that there wasn’t much interest in the vaccine.  But then a couple of young people died.  Young white people.  And suddenly it seemed that everyone wanted that vaccine — at least for their kids.  There were huge line-ups at the clinics when they opened for priority/higher risk population.  Oddly, they only opened 2 clinics for the first week. I heard of people waiting in line with their children for hours, only to be turned away when the clinic closed.  Swell.

It wasn’t an issue for us, initially.  Neither of us were on the priority list.  The list included children 6 months or over (those under 6 months couldn’t get the vaccine), pregnant women and women breastfeeding infants under 6 weeks, people with chronic illnesses… It made us wonder where we fit in.  The Peanut was too young to get the vaccine, but not too young to get the flu.  If S and I couldn’t get vaccinated, then we could catch the flu and give it to him.   It seemed odd that there wasn’t anything we could do for him.

My boss had to pick her daughter up from school on Friday because she had a sudden fever.  It was then that I realized how easy it would be for me to catch the flu and bring it home.  If her daughter had the flu, I couldn’t be sure that my boss hadn’t also exposed me to the virus.  Hypochondria set in – I had a headache…was I getting the flu?  I had body aches… was I getting the flu?  I was getting hot on the walk home… was I getting the flu?  Or was it just because I didn’t have a second coffee in the afternoon, I had moved our summer tires/rims out of the trunk of the car the night before, and I’m often hot on the walk home.

Turns out her daughter is ok, but it was certainly food for though. Toward the end of last week, they added another category to the priority list: people caring for or living with children under 6 months.

Between being on the priority list, and the whole boss’s daughter thing, I decided to get the shot.  Our family doctor is located in a clinic that was providing the vaccine to its registered clients. So S and I got our shots on Monday.  Overall, not so bad.  My arm hurts a bit – the injection area is inflamed.  Red with swelling.  Now, we just have to see if Li’l Sis will get her vaccination.  Or if we’ll have to come up with a plan for what to do if she gets sick.

Welcome to the pandemic.

Update: It’s Thursday and it’s still red and swollen near the injection site.  But it’s not as painful or itchy now as it was Tuesday.  Tuesday was quite uncomfortable.  But I’ve heard some people have suffered flu-like symptoms and body aches/joint pain as well.  So my reaction hasn’t been so bad.