DADWAGON

JP is a little young for this, but I’m sure looking forward to Little League. That plus I’m ready for the good weather to come, which is probably why I came across this video of last year’s Brooklyn Little League Parade. Have a look.

So when we went all viral with Babies in Bars, some of our astute critics pointed out that not only was baby Sasha crying in the  picture, that the bar was, gasp, not even in New York.

True that. It was, in fact, in Bernal Heights in San Francisco, and Matt was there doing his Frugal Traveler thing for the New York Times.

The article is out now, and in the Times Travel section this weekend. Matt even outed himself in his writer biography as a co-founder of DadWagon. Way to fight past the shame.

I am in San Francisco myself today, so let’s put Matt to the test: can he save me and the babies some money?

A bit of bad news for all parents who thought just lifting their kids or chasing them around the house: two-thirds of moms with young kids in a Central College survey weren’t getting enough exercise from parenting alone.

Time to hit the pool after all.

Like a lot of media people (and with apologies to Dadwagoneer Matt), I have a love-hate relationship with the New York Times. Its newsgathering ability is peerless, its authority as solid as any–and its news hole is so big that, at least once a day, there’s a story in its pages that makes you slap your forehead and say Why are they publishing this? Today’s d’oh moment comes from the Thursday Styles section, where we all learned that baby slings are de mode, and that fancy strollers are so 2007. And that a few overexcitable overparenting types have concocted the idea that the only way to bond with your child is to have him or her bound to your body, at all times. (When you add up sling time with co-sleeping, the kid could be in physical contact with you 24/7, which they must think is some sort of tribal ideal.)

Look, I’ve worked on a lot of trend stories in my life, both good and bad. I know how a writer or editor’s everyday experience can loom large enough to seem persuasive: “All of a sudden, everyone I know bought one of these things!” But I also know the signs of a trumped-up “controversy,” and after a thousand words or so, I encountered the following sentence:

Among most new parents, however, feelings about baby carriers are less inflamed.

For a lay audience, let me translate: That means “three people with too much time on their hands–one of whom knows me–natter on about this nonstop, evoking the worst cliche of the obsessive, hyperbolic nightmare urbanite, and everyone else shrugs with indifference.”