When my daughter's godmother, Kimi Ordoubadian Abernathy told me a few years ago that she wanted to try to adopt a baby from the Republic of Georgia or from Azerbaijan, I was very skeptical. No foreigners had ever been allowed to adopt from these regions. But Kimi and her husband Bill persevered and today they are the proud parents of Inara Abernathy, the very first baby to be adopted by a family from outside Azerbaijan. Their story is amazing and it offers guidelines for parents who want to adopt one of the many waiting young children and infants without families in Azerbaijan.

Congratulations to my friend, writer Gayle Brandeis on being awarded the 2002 Bellwether Prize for Fiction for her novel, The Book of Dead Birds.

For decades, the foremost rule of family sleep, as promulgated by
mainstream American parenting experts, has been that infants and
children should never be allowed to sleep with their parents. Last week,
the U.S. Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC) even got in on the
act, warning us that the practice of parents sleeping with their
babies is inherently dangerous and should be avoided. After giving
birth to three children in six years, I can tell you that these
parenting police are way off the mark: the family bed is a sanity and
sleep saver for mothers and babies.

In anthropological surveys of families around the world, researchers
have repeatedly noted that American and other western parents are
unique in their practice of placing infants in separate sleep spaces
rather than in a co-sleeping arrangement with one or both parents. In
most cultures, the idea of leaving a tiny baby alone in a bed with
bars, placed in a room separate from parents is considered as unsafe
and bizarre as if we left our napping baby alone to run out to the grocery store.


"... almost all human infants for the past million or so years have
slept in contact with an adult. And even today, in most places in the
world, infants spend their first year co-sleeping," writes
anthropologist Dr. Meredith Small in her best-selling book, Our Babies,
Ourselves; How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Parent (Doubleday,
1998)

In their statements to the press, officials from the CPSC -- a
government agency that generally reviews product safety rather than
cultural practices or parenting styles -- noted that in a review of
death certificates dating between 1990 and 1997, researchers found 515
instances of American infants who died of suffocation or strangulation
while sleeping in some type of "adult bed." What the CPSC failed to
note, however, is that more than 2,000 infants die each year while
asleep in cribs, bassinets, and cradles. In many cases, these babies
expire from the tragic and still poorly understood phenomenon of SIDS.
In other instances, infants are put to sleep in baby beds with unsafe,
outdated design features, or they suffocate from bedding that is too
soft or in which they become entangled. Yet no one from the government
has come forward to offer a sweeping conclusion that solitary sleeping
is de facto unsafe for babies and should always be avoided.

Perhaps not coincidentally, our solitary-sleeping American babies have
the highest rates of "crib death" in the world. Intriguing data from a
National Insitutes of Health researcher indicate that SIDS rates remain
low among communities of co-sleeping Asian families who immigrate to
the United States, but the number of deaths rises in relation to the
amount of time these families live here, possibly due to the adoption
of American-style customs such as crib-sleeping and bottle-feeding for
babies. Exclusive breastfeeding -- which has now been determined to
significantly lower an infant's statistical risk for SIDS, along with a
host of other potentially fatal maladies - is much more common among
mothers and babies who sleep together, in the United States and
elsewhere. Additionally, researchers have noted that breastfeeding,
co-sleeping infants tend to settle onto their backs or sides alongside
their mothers rather than ending up in the risky face-down sleep
position favored by many babies left to sleep by themselves.


In its recounting of the allegedly startling number of infant deaths
which took place in adult beds, the CPSC's own statistics revealed that
approximately 80% of the total number actually occurred as a result of
factors unrelated to the fact that the baby was sleeping with another
person. In these cases, babies were placed on bedding that was too
soft, leading to suffocation, or they became trapped face-down on
waterbeds, or wedged between a headboard and a mattress. Clearly,
unsafe, poorly designed sleeping arrangements in which this type of
fatal accident is liable to occur are inappropriate for infants,
whether an adult is sharing the bed with them or not. In the remaining
20% of cases -- translating to 121 deaths over a seven year period out
of 4 million live births in the U.S. annually -- at least some of the
deaths were attributable not to babies' parents, but to an unspecified
"caregiver" or sibling rolling on top of the babies. Again, families
who sleep with their babies should be -- and generally are -- aware
that young infants should only sleep beside a parent, usually a
breastfeeding mother. But the idea that these demonstrably unsafe
family bed arrangements are representative of the majority of
co-sleeping family situations in the U.S. is as absurd as claiming that
the existence of the occasional plane crash means that we should
abandon air travel altogether.

As parenting "experts" have attempted to dissuade American mothers from
sleeping with their babies in the past fifty years, a variety of
arguments have been made. Parents have been warned that co-sleeping
would ruin their marriages, create neurotic children, and now,
according to the CSPC announcement, that it is likely to literally kill
their infants. Yeah right. Personally, I’d prefer for the CPSC to stick
to warning us about things like exploding gas tanks and lead paint. I
have no need for them to come into my bedroom and advise me on how I
choose to raise my children.

From the "well, DUH!" files: researchers now believe that children benefit when a well-adjusted adult male -- someone who isn't hanging around the single-parent household for the sole purpose of putting the moves on their mother -- takes a regular interest in their well-being.

Where have all the Grandmas gone?

With economist Sylvia Hewlett's new book on the growing phenomenon of women over 40 having first babies getting such huge attention, I've been doing a lot of thinking about the issue. As a GenX mama myself (I am 34 years old now and was 24 when I had my first baby), I fall on the other end of the spectrum. In fact, for the first several years after I had my son Henry in 1991, I never met another woman my age with children except the "clients" I dealt with in my then job as a social worker visiting homes in deep Appalachia.

The point that today's hip, savvy, educated women are "supposed" to wait until they are pretty well along in life to have a baby was hammered home to me one night in 1992 after I went to see Naomi Wolf (who was at that time touring in support of her first book, The Beauty Myth) give a speech at the University of Tennessee. After her speech, I went to the reception in her honor and stood in line to meet her. As I approached her, with infant Henry strapped to my chest in a baby carrier, Naomi Wolf began cooing and smiling at him. So far so good. She told me how cute he was and I told her that I was a fan of her book. After a few moments she asked me how long I had been babysitting him, since he looked awfully young. I proudly explained that I was his mother. She rolled her eyes in genuine amazement and then said with a rather snide chuckle that she had always heard that women in the South have babies very young and that now she believed it. She laughed at her own observation and then everyone around her laughed too. It felt like an insult and I actually felt like crying as I slunk out of the room. Today Naomi Wolf has "discovered" motherhood herself (waiting, of course, until the socially appropriate age for a college educated woman in the new millenium) and has even written a book about it.

For me, young motherhood has been terrific in most ways. I'm glad I didn't wait. I'm glad I never had to worry about seeing a fertility specialist for age -related problems in getting pregnant. I enjoy the fact that my children have been able to develop close relationships with several of their great grandparents, who are still very much alive. I am happy that when my children are grown, I will likely still have many years left to enjoy them and any children they may choose to have. I can't wait to be a grandmother.

Which brings me to a point I haven't heard mentioned in all the recent debate over women in their forties and even fifties having babies: who will take on the important cultural role of grandmotherhood? I am already noticing an anecdotal decline in the status and visibility of grandmothers in our society, which is certainly due in part to the fact that women are having their own children so late in life. I just wrote an essay on this topic and you can read it HERE.

Which Simpsons character are you? I took the test and was identified as most like....Dr. Hibberd. At least I wasn't Barney or Ralph the paste-eater.

I have been enjoying reading the ongoing diary of new parenthood by writer Michael Lewis (photos by his wife, Tabitha Soren -- yes, that Tabitha Soren ). I guess this is Slate's stab at Salon's groundbreaking and sadly missed Mothers Who Think section (for which I used to write). I have also been perusing the reader < A HREF="http://www.slate.msn.com/?id=3936&t=dadagain"> responses to Lewis's parenting essays in Slate's form, The Fray, with more than a little consternation. After Lewis wrote about his discomfort with any of the "let 'em cry" baby-training methods that populate the modern American parenting landscape, many, many readers expressed the view that Lewis's newborn daughter is simply manipulating her parents by waking to eat at night.

sigh...

Like just about everything else related to human lactation, Americans are sadly misinformed about how our babies are biologically hardwired to eat, sleep, and grow in the first year. As Katherine Dettwyler, an anthropology professor and specialist in cross-cultural infant nutrition has noted, human infants need to nurse very frequently, including during the night, because human breastmilk is very high in water content and is digested quickly. This is true of all the higher order primates, which is one reason why mama apes keep their babies close, day and night. Many other mammal species have a much higher fat- protein content in their breastmilk, allowing the mother to nurse her offspring very infrequently. Rabbits, for example, only nurse their babies once every twenty-four hours.

I nursed my 6 year old daughter until the month before she started kindergarten (you can see a picture of here as a nursing bambino HERE by scrolling to the very bottom of the page. She's the dark-haired baby you see.) and my youngest son, now 4, until he was 3. They eventually stopped wanting to nurse at night (before age 2 with a little gentle encouragement from my husband and me), but that first year of almost constant nursing *is* tiring until you get the hang of it. Since we have always kept our babies in bed with us rather than in a babycage (crib ;-), I eventually got to the point where I would barely even wake up to feed and settle the baby.

But even with my first baby, whom I did not breastfeed, I never let him cry himself to sleep in order to "train" him to sleep on an adult schedule. I never have been able to figure out why we think it's okay to let babies and young children wail alone behind a closed door when if we did that to, say, a bedridden old person with insomnia in our care, it would be considered literally abusive.