Burping Is Overrated

I've decided that burping the baby is overrated, at least for this baby. I've been suspecting this since the day he was born, but over the past four months, I've had a chance to put my theory to the test. I'm responsible for a minimum of one feed per day, which is the evening feed at about 10:30pm every night. Marcus goes to bed at 7pm, and I wake him up at 10:30 for one more bottle so that he can sleep longer. We've been doing this probably since the beginning of the third month.

When I feed him, he's usually pretty groggy, but wakes up slowly during the feed. After he decides he doesn't want any more, I change his diaper and pick him up to burp him. I'm a pretty patient guy, but burping a baby is boring. I give it about one minute, tops. Most of the time, I fail to elicit a burp. No matter, I put him down and he goes back to sleep.

Guess what? It makes no difference to him whether he burps or not. He sleeps through the night anyway. I realize that this may be just one baby and one data point, but it still counts for something. The idea behind burping is that babies will swallow air when they feed, and the stomach becomes distended and uncomfortable. That may lead to decreased intake, or waking up in the middle of the night with "gas pain" or something like that. So you gotta help bring it up. A bunch of hooey.

Gas pain as we adults experience it is not due to air we swallow; it's due to digestive problems producing gas from inside. Now, if your baby is intolerant to something it's eating, then maybe it has gas that's painful. Possibly in the stomach, but more likely in the intestines. And burping won't help with gas in the intestines. On the other hand, if it swallows air, it'll burp it out, and I feel like it shouldn't need that much help doing it.

Hey, I'm not giving parenting advice. I'm just saying that I do a crappy job of burping my baby, and it doesn't seem to matter.

Bing: Final Answer

So I gave Microsoft's newly repackaged search engine a one-month test drive just to see how I felt about it. No, I didn't really use it exclusively, but I did use it a lot. I used it for general searches when I had a question, and I used it for image searches, which I do a lot especially for this blog.

Here's what I think about Bing. It's lightning fast, maybe a hair faster than Google but I didn't bother trying to figure out how to time it. Let's just say speed definitely wasn't an issue. The results are also well-organized, and I found what I wanted usually within the top three hits. I like the organization of the images better than Google's arrangement, although it took a little getting used to. I also love the daily photo changes on the front page of the Bing.com site. Very pretty.

Though I definitely don't have a problem with using Bing on a regular basis, the practical thing for me is to stick with Google. Google is embedded into my default browser (Safari) as well as my backup browser (Firefox). That fact alone makes it highly unlikely that I'll switch to Bing any time soon. If my favorite browser in the future has Bing as the default search engine, I won't bother to change it. But I'm also not going to bother with figuring out how to change the current default search engine either. So I'm sticking with Google.

But Bing really is a comparable product to Google. I'm very impressed with it, and don't mind using it at all. It'll stay on my bookmark bar so I can click it every once in a while just to change things up. I think Microsoft did a bang-up job with it.

Marcus Screams

Marcus went to the doctor's again for his four-month checkup this past week. He's slipped a little off his previous growth curve, weighing in at 15 pounds 4 ounces and measuring 26 inches in length. That's good for 70th percentile in weight and 90th percentile in length. His head is still small, but still growing, somewhere around the 25th percentile. Can't imagine why he has such a small head when his parents are such large-headed people. And his malformed ear is still malformed, but there's nothing to do for now. He can apparently hear okay with the good ear, which is good enough for me.

He reaches for objects a little bit more if he's interested, and looks all around the room to see what's going on. He still can't sit up straight, which is what I'm waiting for. His smiles and giggles still aren't quite as frequent as some other babies, but he does it enough that I know he's not abnormal. He loves to touch my stubbly face when I haven't shaved, and he reacts now when he looks in the mirror.

In the past three days, he's discovered a new voice that he likes to exercise. It's a shrieking sound that drives me bananas, like a parrot's screech. Mostly he does it when he's bored and trying to entertain himself, which is a lot of the time. It's a little embarrassing when we take him out in public, though it hasn't stopped us from going out. Just took him to Peter Luger yesterday, and tomorrow we're heading to Jean-Georges for brunch with my parents.

It's not a squeal, exactly. Really, it's a screech. And it's annoying as hell. I don't think he's asking for attention, and it's not usually when he's upset. He's basically replaced cooing and gurgling with screeching. A loud, long, high-pitched screech like an owl on the hunt. This had better be a phase, because I don't know how long I'll be able to stand it. Actually, as long as you keep him engaged, he keeps the screech holstered. It's the moment you leave him to his own amusement ... that's when he pulls it out. One screech after the next. And he doesn't get hoarse until the end of the day. He's got some lungs on him, he does. And very pliable vocal cords too, apparently.

We're trying to give him vitamin drops every day, and luckily he does like the taste of it. The doctor says it's important for vitamins A, D, and C, all of which are lacking to some extent in breast milk. If we were feeding him mostly formula, he wouldn't need the drops. The only reason we don't give it to him every day is because we forget. We're lame parents. But I don't know if he really needs the vitamins anyway. I mean, he drinks almost a quart of breast milk a day, and he gets plenty of sunshine because Janelle takes him out every afternoon. He's probably okay if we forget once in a while. Right?

Laces Out | Vick Debuts With Eagles

I wanted to watch the Eagles tonight against Jacksonville just to see Vick play, but I couldn't find a station that was carrying the game among my hundreds of cable channels. What is the point of having all those channels anyway? Do people actually watch them all? Enough people so that those channels can make enough money to actually turn a profit and keep broadcasting? You gotta be kidding me. So I ended up reading a live blog on ESPN and waiting for the game recap to be published.

Seems Vick played early in the game, just six plays total, and got his feet wet without making any mistakes. Coach Reid didn't make us wait too long to catch a glimpse of Vick, inserting him on the second play of the game. The crowd didn't boo him much (not surprised). He said after the game that he's about 70% of the way there in terms of his fitness level, and he just wants to contribute to the team in whatever way he's asked to. Good man.

Earlier in the day, a sad / funny story came out from Richmond VA. Seems the CEO of the local SPCA, a woman by the name of Robin Starr who has been outspoken against Vick's cruelty to dogs, inadvertently killed her own dog by leaving it in the car all morning while she was at work; the dog suffered kidney failure.

Now, I'm not entirely convinced I know what the word "ironic" means, and I'm not always sure I know when something is or isn't ironic. But I'm pretty positive this story is ironic.

Inside The Park | Johan Santana Out For Season

Not that it really matters that much since the Mets' season is already shot, but ace starting pitcher Johan Santana is done for the season after finding bone chips in his elbow. He will require surgery, and should be ready to return by spring training next year.

Do you get the sense that the whole team is just quitting at this point? Not that Santana's injury isn't real or anything. But I can't help but wonder if the players have all started their offseason planning. Wagner is gone. Santana is gone. Wright still isn't back. No Reyes, no Beltrain, no Delgado. Who else do they have? The other night, Fernando Tatis was batting cleanup. I think he has 9 HRs this year. It's just crazy.

Inside The Park | Mets Must Be Cursed

This one's for my good friend Michael, a die-hard Mets fan who must be feeling pretty okay about moving out of NYC just so he can stop reading about the Mets. I turned on the TV today to catch the Phillies-Mets contest this afternoon, mostly to catch a glimpse of Pedro. What a debacle for the Mets.

Oliver Perez, whom the Mets deemed worthy of signing to a hefty three-year $36M contract before the start of the season, got chased out of the game before the first inning was over after giving up six runs on two two long homers. Pedro Martinez, whom the Mets deemed not worthy of even being re-signed to a minimal contract, beat them on 6 innings of mostly strong pitching. And just when it looked like the Mets had an opening and might rally in the bottom of the ninth against shaky closer Brad Lidge, cruel and wicked Fate slammed the door shut.

The game stood at 9-6 when two fielding errors led to an unearned run and put two additional runners on board, still nobody out. Mets call a double steal on what looked like a hit-and-run scenario, and Jeff Franceour smokes a liner up the middle. But second baseman Eric Bruntlett was right on top of it because he was moving to cover second base on the steal. In the blink of an eye, he stabbed the line drive for the first out, stepped on second base for the second out, and tagged Daniel Murphy coming from first base for the final out. Unassisted triple play.

What a demoralizing way to end a rally. What a demoralizing season it's been for the Mets overall. I hate the Mets as much as I hate the Celtics and the Cowboys, but I really feel sorry for Mets fans. They're not bad people, but this season has just been the pits.

Their team has been decimated by injuries to their top players: Jose Reyes, Carlos Beltran, Carlos Delgado, and now even David Wright. That's the meat of their lineup right there, all sitting in the trainer's room. It looks like they may have to pay someone to take Billy Wagner, who has an enormous contract and has been injured, off their hands.

The most bizarre story of the season is probably the Tony Bernazard episode. Bernazard, who was a team executive, apparently went to a minor league game and was so disgusted with the play (and probably the attitudes) of the players that he got into a shouting match with the players and ripped off his shirt and challenged them all to a fist fight. What on earth is going on with the Mets?

And now the news comes out that the Mets are sticking with beleaguered and unpopular general manager Omar Minaya. Man, I would not wish this kind of misery on my worst enemies ... which I guess would be Mets fans anyway. But I wouldn't, really. They just need to euthanize this wretched season. There's no way next year could possibly be this bad or this weird.

Women Hold Up Half the Sky

The cover story in this week's New York Times Magazine is a great article about the under-reported plight of women around the globe. If you don't have the stamina to read the article, please consider viewing the beautiful pictorial narrated by the author of the piece.

As the authors mention, this isn't a story about what we in this country often think of when we talk about women's rights -- unequal pay, Title IX violations, sexual harrassment. This is a story about far graver injustices, primarily in developing nations -- sex trafficking, acid attacks, bride burnings, mass rape. The vast majority of us are so far removed from these places and these people that they are merely stories told to us by the media, if the media deems it newsworthy.

The societies in which these atrocities are committed tend to be poor, male-dominated, in some cases ravaged by war. And the root of all the evil appears to be poor education and inadequate health care for girls. Without education and good health, women in these places are more easily victimized from birth through adulthood.

The article makes several interesting points. The poorest families in the world tend to spend 10 times as much of their money on alcohol, prostitution, candy, sugary drinks and lavish feasts as they do on educating their children. When times are good, men tend to spend more money on alcohol and tobacco, whereas women spend their cash on food for the family. "When women command greater power, child health and nutrition improves," says Esther Duflo, and economist at MIT.

China makes a surprising example. Most of us know about the one-child policy and the tendency for families to prefer male children to the point of aborting daughters before they are born or exposing them to the elements after birth. The result is that there are now 107 males for every 100 females in China. In the 1990s, they estimate up to 80% of assembly line workers in coastal China were women, working long hours in the so-called "sweat shops" for seemingly little pay.

The surprising part of that last fact is that the authors suggest that working in those sweat shops actually empowered women by turning them into contributors of the national economy and allowing them some financial independence. The skills they acquired along with the money has elevated their status in society to some extent, though certainly the inequality and discrimination persist.

India is painted in a far worse light in the article. The gender gap is 108:100, worse than China. People, and especially women, are forced into labor of all sorts, include the sex trade. Bride burnings for inadequate dowry occur in India at a rate of about one every two hours.

Microfinance organizations that make small loans to start small businesses are increasingly targeting women as clients because that's where they get the most bang for the buck. It's becoming increasingly clear, according to the authors of the article, that empowering women to be productive members of the economy is an effective strategy in the war against poverty and extremism.

I was so moved by this article that Janelle and I have decided to make one of these microfinance organizations our first official charity donation. Because Janelle has worked in a microfinance company in the past, she does have opinions and resources to help us decide where to put our money. Of course, recommendations are always welcome. This is a global problem that needs more attention in the media, and I think contributing to the solution in whatever small way I can is the least that I can do.