The start of a nursery!

I'm getting bigger!

Remember my last picture at 18 weeks?

(18w0d)

Here I am at 23 weeks, wearing the exact same outfit:

 

(23w3d)

Can you see the difference?  ;)

Should the World of Toys Be Gender-Free?

By PEGGY ORENSTEIN

Berkeley, Calif.
NOW that the wrapping paper and the infernal clamshell packaging have been relegated to the curb and the paying off of holiday bills has begun, the toy industry is gearing up — for Christmas 2012. And its early offerings have ignited a new debate over nature, nurture, toys and sex.

Hamleys, which is London’s 251-year-old version of F.A.O. Schwarz, recently dismantled its pink “girls” and blue “boys” sections in favor of a gender-neutral store with red-and-white signage. Rather than floors dedicated to Barbie dolls and action figures, merchandise is now organized by types (Soft Toys) and interests (Outdoor).

That free-to-be gesture was offset by Lego, whose Friends collection, aimed at girls, will hit stores this month with the goal of becoming a holiday must-have by the fall. Set in fictive Heartlake City (and supported by a $40 million marketing campaign), the line features new, pastel-colored, blocks that allow a budding Kardashian, among other things, to build herself a cafe or a beauty salon. Its tasty-sounding “ladyfig” characters are also taller and curvier than the typical Legoland denizen.

So who has it right? Should gender be systematically expunged from playthings? Or is Lego merely being realistic, earnestly meeting girls halfway in an attempt to stoke their interest in engineering?

Among the “10 characteristics for Lego” described in 1963 by a son of the founder was that it was “for girls and for boys,” as Bloomberg Businessweek reported. But the new Friends collection, Lego says, was based on months of anthropological research revealing that — gasp! — the sexes play differently.

While as toddlers they interact similarly with the company’s Duplo blocks, by preschool girls prefer playthings that are pretty, exude “harmony” and allow them to tell a story. They may enjoy building, but they favor role play. So it’s bye-bye Bionicles, hello princesses. In order to be gender-fair, today’s executives insist, they have to be gender-specific.

As any developmental psychologist will tell you, those observations are, to a degree, correct. Toy choice among young children is the Big Kahuna of sex differences, one of the largest across the life span. It transcends not only culture but species: in two separate studies of primates, in 2002 and 2008, researchers found that males gravitated toward stereotypically masculine toys (like cars and balls) while females went ape for dolls. Both sexes, incidentally, appreciated stuffed animals and books.

Human boys and girls not only tend to play differently from one another — with girls typically clustering in pairs or trios, chatting together more than boys and playing more cooperatively — but, when given a choice, usually prefer hanging with their own kind.

Score one for Lego, right? Not so fast. Preschoolers may be the self-appointed chiefs of the gender police, eager to enforce and embrace the most rigid views. Yet, according Lise Eliot, a neuroscientist and the author of “Pink Brain, Blue Brain,” that’s also the age when their brains are most malleable, most open to influence on the abilities and roles that traditionally go with their sex.

Every experience, every interaction, every activity — when they laugh, cry, learn, play — strengthens some neural circuits at the expense of others, and the younger the child the greater the effect. Consider: boys from more egalitarian homes are more nurturing toward babies. Meanwhile, in a study of more than 5,000 3-year-olds, girls with older brothers had stronger spatial skills than both girls and boys with older sisters.
At issue, then, is not nature or nurture but how nurture becomes nature: the environment in which children play and grow can encourage a range of aptitudes or foreclose them. So blithely indulging — let alone exploiting — stereotypically gendered play patterns may have a more negative long-term impact on kids’ potential than parents imagine. And promoting, without forcing, cross-sex friendships as well as a breadth of play styles may be more beneficial. There is even evidence that children who have opposite-sex friendships during their early years have healthier romantic relationships as teenagers.

Traditionally, toys were intended to communicate parental values and expectations, to train children for their future adult roles. Today’s boys and girls will eventually be one another’s professional peers, employers, employees, romantic partners, co-parents. How can they develop skills for such collaborations from toys that increasingly emphasize, reinforce, or even create, gender differences? What do girls learn about who they should be from Lego kits with beauty parlors or the flood of “girl friendly” science kits that run the gamut from “beauty spa lab” to “perfume factory”?

The rebellion against such gender apartheid may have begun. Consider the latest cute-kid video to go viral on YouTube: “Riley on Marketing” shows a little girl in front of a wall of pink packaging, asking, “Why do all the girls have to buy pink stuff and all the boys have to buy different-color stuff?” It has been viewed more than 2.4 million times.

Perhaps, then, Hamleys is on to something, though it will doubtless meet with resistance — even rejection — from both its pint-size customers and multinational vendors. As for me, I’m trying to track down a poster of a 1981 ad for a Lego “universal” building set to give to my daughter. In it, a freckle-faced girl with copper-colored braids, baggy jeans, a T-shirt and sneakers proudly holds out a jumbly, multi-hued Lego creation. Beneath it, a tag line reads, “What it is is beautiful.”

Peggy Orenstein is the author, most recently, of “Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches From the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture.”

I already told Mike that I don't want any kids books on Kindle, especially early reader books. Glad to hear the research supports my intuition in this area!

Why Books Are Better than e-Books for Children

By KJ DELL’ANTONIA

 

Do you read to your children from your iPad or other device, or encourage them to use an e-reader to read to you? Many of us do, at least on occasion — even I, who wrote here some weeks ago that I rarely read on my own iPad anymore because I want my children to see me reading books, recommended an app for creating fun picture books for travel last week. If you have a tablet or e-reader, why not add it to your child’s reading repertory as well?

The answer, according to Lisa Guernsey of the New America Foundation’s Early Education Initiative, is that when we read with a child on an e-reader, we may actually impede our child’s ability to learn. Ms. Guernsey interpreted recent research on childhood literacy for Time magazine, and found that parents interact differently with children over an e-reader than over a physical book. That difference may make children slower to read and comprehend a story.

Children sitting with a parent while an e-reader reads to them understand significantly less of what’s read than those hearing a parent read. Researchers at Temple University, where the study was done, noted that parents reading books aloud regularly asked children questions about the book: “What do you think will happen next?” Parents sitting with the child while a device read to them (like a LeapPad or some iPad apps) didn’t ask these questions, or relate images or incidents in the book to the child’s real life. Instead, their conversation was focused on how to use the device: “Careful! Push here. Hold it this way.”

Ms. Guernsey, observing videos of parents reading to their children from iPads, found a tendency to do the same, even when the device wasn’t doing the reading. Readers with an e-reader were focused on the device, not the story. Children whose parents talk to them about what they’re reading gain reading skills faster, but children reading with parents from digital rather than physical books aren’t getting as much of that kind of interaction.



Does that mean we should never read with or to our children from our various gadgets? Not necessarily. In our house, we find the devices themselves too distracting for regular reading, but I imagine that a child who’s more accustomed to an e-reader wouldn’t be convinced, as mine are, that the book represents a preliminary activity to a rare game of Angry Birds. If I did read from my iPad, I’d look hard at how I talked with my child as we swiped the pages and ask myself whether the tool was changing the conversation. I don’t, so instead, I’m asking myself the usual guilty-parent question, and worrying about whether we read together enough in any medium.

Do you read with a child from any kind of e-reader, or have a child who regularly uses an electronic tool to read? Do you see any ways your child’s reading experience is different when she reads from a physical book as opposed to an e-reader, or when you use books or e-readers together? What’s your call on the e-reader versus the paper book for children?

more on names

Thanks for all the wonderful name suggestions we've gotten so far! I can't believe that pretty much every has suggested Sophie/Sophia. That's not going to be her name, but funny have everyone loves that name!

I have to admit that I'm just absolutely fascinated by baby names and naming trends. In fact, I'm such a nerd that I've been following the Baby Name Wizard blog for the past, oh, five years or so - ever since I read the Freakonomics chapter on baby names (see here for a very brief summary, in case you haven't already read the book). BNW is my favorite blog! (Well, that and Cake Wrecks and Post Secrets, but those are each a completely different topic!)

Plus, the BNW website (not just the blog) has some super cool graphs and charts. (Oooh, how I love statistics!)  For example, you can see here how Sophie/Sophia has skyrocketed in popularity in the last ~20 years or so. Crazy!

So I'm going to give you all some hints about the name we're leaning toward:
1. It's a family name (first name from one side of our families, middle name from the other - just like how we were both named).
2. It hasn't been in the top 100 names since the 1950's.
3. It's popularity has been stagnant since the 1960's, so hopefully Baby won't be one of 5 with her name in her kindergarten class.

Okay, from now on mum's the word. You'll just have to stay tuned until April to find out what we're calling her. :)

updates

I'm at work so have to make this update brief, but wanted to let you all know that we had another medical appointment this morning and everything still looks great! My uterus is right where it should be, and baby's heartbeat (about 140) is right where it should be as well. And my nurse practitioner reassured me that the weird sensations I've been having intermittently for the past week or so are probably actually Baby moving!! I didn't want to get my hopes up and accidentally get excited about gas or indigestion or something, but it seems like I'm actually feeling movement and it's okay to get sentimental about that. :)  Hopefully Mike will be able to feel him/her as well in the coming weeks.


Other than that, I've just been taking it easy as I continue to recover from yet another common cold. I'm really getting sick of this whole suppressed immune system business during pregnancy. But I'm now a staunch advocate of the Neti pot - if you get me started, I'll talk your ear off about it!


Happy holidays!

weeks 22-24: papaya

Apparently growth isn't so rapid anymore, so now we switch to size updates every few weeks...

Baby's the size of a papaya!

Watch what you say -- baby is now able to hear outside noise from down in the womb. Studies show that baby finds gentle music and your own voice most soothing. Nipples are starting to sprout, and that little face is fully formed. And, baby's starting to settle into sleep cycles, snoozing about 12 to 14 hours a day. It shouldn't be hard to figure out when -- just pay attention to those kicks as they start and stop.