I’ve been exchanging e-mails with a member of the TOC staff who’s on maternity leave after giving birth to twins a couple of months ago. Reading about how tired and exasperated she is sometimes—life isn’t at all peachy when there you’ve got two babies crying to be fed at the same time—reminded me of how disoriented I felt the first few months after having my twins almost five years ago.

Those were not my prettiest days, to say the least. Any day I had a chance to shower was an especially good day; primping was certainly not high on my priority list. But I eventually figured out that spending even just few minutes to take care of myself went a long way toward making everyone in our family happy. (Cranky mommies tend to make everyone in their paths cranky, too.)

I’ve been rounding up products that help new moms relax - as well as look and feel good - without a lot of effort.  It’s all about speed and efficiency; looking good certainly helps you feel good, but nothing feels as good as a precious extra few minutes of sleep.

Here are some of my favorites:

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I feel old.

It hit me the first time early this afternoon while my four-year-old daughter and I took a break from all of our festival carousing to share a monster-sized lemonade. The singer in a band playing nearby starting shouting “FUUUUUCK YOUUUUU!” over and over again, and I just wanted to cover the kid’s ears and run. (I didn’t.)

It hit me again hanging out with her in the Kidzapalooza area, where we bopped along with the Blisters (who sang “Sweet Home Alabama” and “Rockin’ in the Free World”) and the Sippy Cups (we loved their “I Wanna Be Elated” finale). I realized that I felt more at home there, with parents swigging samples of Lifeway smoothies and the kids getting tricked out in punk hair styles and temporary tattoos, than I did walking around the rest of the fest.

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Cheap white bread has a nostalgia that few things can replace. You can rip off the crusts and mash up the fluffy white center into little bread balls. There’s a sugary taste in there that, when coupled with PB&J, is toothache-terrific. And if you press your hand down onto a packaged loaf, it’ll be next year before the shape springs back. Sara Lee is aiming to challenge Wonder’s status as king of that style with their new Soft & Smooth line, and they’re hoping that you and your kids (or your sister’s or your neighbor’s or some hungry money-swindlers you met on the subway) will come down to Navy Pier next Thursday, the 19th, to chow down on some slices for their Sara Lee Pickiest Eater Challenge. Eat until your stomach is distended, jot down a “Yay! This bread rules” or a “Damn, man, Wonder whupped y’all’s asses,” and then pick up a free ticket for Chicago Children’s Museum. The event is BYOPB (Bring Your Own Peanut Butter, fools).

Chicago Children’s Museum South Dock on Navy Pier; 630.598.7272 for more info

Long time ago (we’re talking about my youth here) I was backpacking around Turkey where I met and traveled for a pleasant spell with a Swiss girl named Nikola. She told me that her dad had had to go through all kinds of legal and bureaucratic hoops to get her newborn self registered under that name due to its unorthodox spelling, which her parents invented. It seems that the Swiss do not permit a whole lot of parental latitude in the naming process. That struck me at the time to be an absurd and intolerable incursion of the state into the realm of private family life, but the world since then has changed in ways that make me think that our gold-grubbing, money-laundering, cuckoo-clock-inventing, Alpenhorn-playing chocolate-mongering noncombatant friends over in Neutralityland might be on to something important. Similar regulation here would have spared us the current plague of children bearing made-up names no two of which are spelled the same even though they all sound alike. You know what I’m talking about, you proudly original parents of JaeLynne, JayLinne, Jalyn, Jayln, Jaylyn, Jalynne, Kayleigh, Kaieleah, Kaylee, Caileagh etc etc etc.

Anyway, this is basically apropos of nothing except that I stumbled across this way cool website over the weekend. Just google “Namevoyager” and see where it takes you. It’s a resource for historical info about names in America. Looks like a cross-section of multicolored strata not unlike sedimentary rock. Move your cursor vertically and it generates alphabetized pop-ups for any name that has ever been on the Top-1000 list since 1880 to the present. Move your cursor horizontally and it takes you up and down the time-line. Click on a given name and you get an isolated chart plotting its fluctuations over time. (I don’t know if I’m describing this well, but it’s a really intuitive thing to mess with and pretty enthralling to boot).

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I know most of you out there probably haven’t stepped foot into a Chicago Public Library since you were knee-high to a grasshopper, but I just read about a great program the CPL offers all summer long: In an effort to get kids off the couch and into the great outdoors, the Rods & Reads program hopes to convince parents to stroll into participating branches (call your local or go here to find out which ones are in the mix) to check out a fishing rod for the same three-week grace period you’d get if you were checking out, say, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The CPL also has Discover Fishing backpacks available for check out, which includes tomes on fishing, navigating the waters and even some measuring tape to encourage catch-and-release techniques. Sounds like an easy way to land the big one—a smile on junior’s face once he hooks the catch of the day.

Hardly a day goes by that I don’t put a temporary tattoo on my 3-year-old daughter. We shop for them together at a nearby party store, and she usually picks out something butch and scary, bypassing even her beloved Dora the Explorer in favor of a dragon or some occult-looking celestial weirdness with moons and stars and stuff. The fun part is putting them on, because she makes a big production out of picking the right spot on her arm, leg, chest or shoulder, and then we do the ritual count to thirty as I press a wet paper towel on the selected body part. When the wraps come off she preens and flexes and, in the case of a dragon, practices her roaring sounds. As of last night she’s wearing two dragons, one on her forearm and one on her shin. She lines them up side by side and makes up little dialogs for them. E.g.:

Dragon 1: What’s your name?
Dragon 2: Dragon. What’s your name?
Dragon 1: Dragon.
Dragon 2: ROOOOAR!
Dragon 1: ROOOOAR!

Anyway, as of last night my wife told me to ease off with the tattoos. “This is going to come back to haunt us when she’s 13 and comes home with a set of those stupid ass antlers on the small of her back,” she says.

“The subtle genius of my parenting eludes you,” sez me. “I’m conducting a program of inoculation here. By the time she’s 13 she’ll be protectively conditioned with the desire to change the design every other day, so no needle will ever touch her.”

Though Rebecca Walker distributes bitter little nuggets about her famous mother throughout her book on the joys of motherhood, she also delivers a great big down payment of spleen against Alice in the first chapter. Actually it’s more of an attack on mothers in general. I quote:

Because mothers make us, because they map our emotional terrain before we even know we are capable of having an emotional terrain, they know just where to stick the dynamite. With a few small power plays—a skeptical comment, the withholding of approval or praise—a mother can devastate a daughter. Decades of such subtle undermining can stunt a daughter, or so monopolize her energy that she in effect stunts herself. Muted, fearful, riddled with self-doubt, she can remain trapped in daughterhood forever, the one place she feels confident she knows the rules.

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I apologize for not completing my serial rubbishing of Rebecca Walker’s Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence, but my insomnia has been in remission for several weeks. Now it’s back and so am I, dear readers.

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“Why the hell didn’t anyone tell me how much it was going to hurt?” That’s what Yale-educated Third Wave feminist Rebecca Walker (author of Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence) demands to know about the experience commonly compared, by those who have been there, to shitting a watermelon. “Why the hell didn’t anyone tell me how much it was going to hurt?”

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No doubt all-y’all are getting impatient for some actual mother-daughter-celebrity-cage-match in-fighting/eye-gouging/cat-fighting. Bloodthirsty rabble that you are, I can hear you stomping rhythmically up on the bleachers and chanting, “ALICE! ALICE! ALICE!”

Well, chill already. You paid to see the high-diving act and you’ll see the high-diving act. But only in due time and not until we’ve establish a little context. Context, as we learned from our recent discussion of the relative merits of making your own baby from materials found around the house versus outsourcing its manufacture to a third and possibly a fourth party, is way important.

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