Author: maryrekosh

If your baby has an iPotty (training potty with iPad attached, obviously), your toddler boys have portable urinals, and you and your daughter are currently wearing matching breastmilk-pendant necklaces, congratulations! You’re taking advantage of some of the completely absurd new and innovative parenting products available today.

If you’re a slacker dark-ages parent like me, you should be ashamed of yourself. I know I am. I can’t believe I never had a poop alarm to insert into my babies’ diapers, and instead relied on being tipped off that a change was needed when they had a fountain of poo running up their back and out the neck hole of their onesie. The technical parenting term for this is ‘poonami’, by the way. I never even had any crafty keepsakes made from my placentas, for pity’s sake. The craziest thing I did was have a plaster cast made of my pregnant belly because who doesn’t want to have a ginormous commemoration of the fattest and most uncomfortable most glorious and radiant time of their lives to hang on the wall. So what if the product looks like an igloo meant to shelter a sumo wrestler?

When I heard about some of the products available to new parents today, I had no choice but to do further research in order to make fun of the people who buy this crap—I mean, become more informed. So I called up a girlfriend of mine who—like me—has more kids than she can responsibly handle, and we decided to do a little investigative research at Babies “R” Us on Route 29. We were a good team because two frazzled mom brains are better than one, but admittedly still less effective than the brain of your average third grader.

The following are a few of our favorite new parenting products. If you’re wondering whether the parents who buy these things are better than the rest of us, the answer is of course they are. They may also be higher strung and alarmingly sober.

SnotSucker

This is a tube you stick in baby’s nose and suck out the snot like a straw. When my kids were babies I had one of those ball-shaped sucker things that you squeeze to suck snot out, which grossed me out because I didn’t know what all was stuck up in that ball over time. Know what’s grosser? Knowing exactly what’s there because you sucked it up into your own mouth-hole. If you can stomach this, you win parenting.

Breast milk alcohol test strips

I won’t concede that moms who use these are better than I am, but they may in fact be sober-er. Or interested in keeping their babies sober. (Does it really matter? They’re not driving, and when they try to walk they run into walls anyway.) Let’s just say my nursing bras were made out of cork and my kids turned out O.K. They still prefer to have their grapes cut in half and fermented.

My PeePee Bottle

This is a personalized water bottle intended for use as a “travel potty.” Because asking your 3-year-old to pee into a tiny Nalgene from her car seat is way more sensible than stopping at a rest stop.

Baby butt fan

This is funnier in name than in function. I think the purpose is to dry baby’s caboose before re-diapering it, but originally I thought it had something to do with alleviating smell in which case Good Luck With That.

Placenta brooch

This is just your average brooch shaped like a placenta, not actually made out of your placenta. So, not weird at all. If you want weird, you will have to send your placenta to someone who will dry it, cut it up into pieces, and sew it together Frankenstein-style in the shape of a teddy bear. You can find this service online. I’m not kidding. If you already have all of these things and need to know what to get next in order to stay at the head of the pack of bats*#t crazy, well-equipped parents, you may want to check out Play Doh-scented cologne, baby wigs, the “baby lasso,” the over-the-door baby hanger, and “gas plugs,” which you actually shove right up your baby’s southern hemisphere. You’re welcome, and your gold medal for parenthood is in the mail.

For decades, Linda and Clay Trainum had dreamed of creating a sustainable business that they could run as a family with their now-grown sons (Logan, 26, Tyler, 25, and Luke, 20). In 2008, the Trainums moved from North Carolina to Clay’s family farm in Waynesboro and began the daunting task of cleaning up the overgrown property. The solution? African Boer-Bok goats. They aimed to turn the farm into a productive resource, and today Autumn Olive Farms is thriving and growing. They provide artisan meats to high quality local and regional restaurants and butcheries, and to Richmond’s Belmont Butchery.

It’s clear that both generations of the Trainum family take great pride in the products they provide for their clients. Said Tyler, “They have an empty canvas—they don’t want to use a pack of crayons to make their art.”

Logan, Tyler, and Luke enjoy running the farm together as brothers, but agree that, as Logan put it, “It can be difficult. We know how to push each other’s buttons.” They point out that living and working on the family farm may sound idyllic, and while it’s a deeply satisfying way of life, it is also hard work with very little down time. Essentially, they say, the crowing rooster is their work whistle and the animals in their charge don’t accommodate requests for vacation time.

While the immediate Trainum family runs Autumn Olive Farms, it has also become something of an outdoor classroom for young extended family members and other youth in the community. In particular, Linda and Clay’s homeschooled great-nieces, Lauren and Maran Baker (11-year-old twins), who spend each Friday on the farm and say the experience “brings science to life.”

Linda’s background as a veterinary technician makes her well-equipped to teach the girls practical lessons in this living laboratory. With the Trainums’ guidance, Lauren and Maran have dissected the hearts and livers of goats and hogs in order to learn in-depth about the anatomy and systematic health of the farm’s livestock, and more broadly about mammals in general. Without flinching, the girls describe how they also sometimes “gather poop to look at under the microscope” in order to perform fecal analysis of farm animals for diagnostic and preventative purposes. This requires that they learn about exactly what they are looking for under the microscope (for example, worms or evidence of disease), hypothesize based on other symptoms and/or background evidence, and form an educated opinion about next steps based on their findings.

And the girls have had hands-on experience with treating sick and injured animals, too. They’ve given numerous shots, and have even helped their uncle perform a surgical procedure on a very infected goat hoof in order to relieve swelling.

The twins’ farm-based education isn’t all veterinary science, though. They work in the farm’s greenhouse as well, which is a vibrant and daily lesson in botany and plant management. And their understanding of agriculture, sustainability, and ecology is both broad and deep, due to Clay’s substantial knowledge in these fields and his steadfast commitment to best practices. Lauren and Maran can give a detailed description of their uncle’s unique method of invasive plant management, complete with reasons behind its effectiveness and benefits for crops, animals, and the eventual human consumer. Recently they were given the opportunity to demonstrate this and other knowledge to peers when they led a tour group of other homeschoolers around the farm.

While the girls are tender and loving with the animals and spend much of their educational time devoted to the required daily tasks of feeding and handling them, they have a clear understanding of their fate and purpose in this environment—and they enjoy the end result, to boot. In fact, Lauren and Maran won’t eat store-bought meats or eggs because they “just don’t taste as good,” and they enjoy helping make bacon and stuffing sausage casings.

That’s not to say that life on the farm is all science and pork. Linda points out that it’s important to have a good deal of humanity to balance the business aspect of their trade, and that occasionally farm animals work their way into the family as pets. “Naming an animal is a bad business decision,” she said, but of course it happens sometimes—and often it changes the fate of that animal. Some of the family’s beloved bad business decisions include roosters Foghorn and Leghorn, and hogs Pete, Sass, and Mia Ham.

Asked about their favorite aspects of the farm life experience, Lauren and Maran simultaneously exclaimed, “It’s fun!” To which Lauren added, “…and I love the bacon.”