I Think We Need One of These

Parents are suckers.

So not surprisingly, the market is constantly flooded with new items that sound like a must have for today's modern parent. But in reality they suck. And if you take a moment to think about it before grabbing your credit card you'll be glad you did.

One such example from around the time of a baby Cracker was the Pee-pee Teepee. A must have for the mother of all little boys? Ummm...sounds good, but NO. Now I don't know about your kid, but when my baby peed, even in a laying down position, his wee-wee jumped to attention (yes, instant erection style) and the force with which he emptied his bladder caused pee to shoot across the room, go through the mini blinds, hit the window, stream down to finally pool up in the window sill. (This why we moved the changing table away from the window. He couldn't even begin to reach for the deadly blind cords yet, but I was tired of cleaning pee off the miniblinds.) If my dad was in the room during a diaper change he'd scream "COVER THE SHOOTER! COVER THE SHOOTER!"

Normally we were just really fast. Okay, I was really fast. J...not so much. Maybe it's because I had the breastmilk and he had useless man nipples*, but the Cracker maybe peed on me once. J? Oh so many times! (Snort.) So the Pee-pee Teepee? How the heck would it have not become a projectile? And if it had stayed in place, then the pee would have streamed down his sides and now I would have had to have given him a bath. (I seriously doubt the thing has any real absorbency.) So what J did was simply lay a cloth diaper over that area. Cheaper. Easy to put in place. (Cause if you're cleaning a monster poo and have to lift the kid up to get underneath, is a Pee-pee Teepee staying put? I think NOT.) Cloth diapers are washable; heavy enough to hold a wee in place yet absorbent enough to soak up the pee. Clever? Well he is an Engineer.

So after such a scorching review of a product I've never used or even seen in real life, what I do need?

This.

It's a smoke alarm, not yet (widely) available, that uses your voice to wake your child in case of fire. I found out about it this morning from who else but my 2am-know-it-all-internet-mommy friends.

Okay, so why? Here's the article. Even better, here's a video from an NBC station.

At first I was thinking phony bologna. But then I thought back to the times our smoke alarms did go off, and the more I thought the more I remembered that this didn't happen just once, but many times back in our old apartment. And I remember how shocked I was that the loudest most annoying sound ever didn't make a sleeping Cracker wake up screaming. Or even wake up. He was only 2 and a half when we moved out, but this happened so many times and he never ever stirred. Seriously.

Often, it wasn't me burning something in the kitchen, but a neighbor. (Okay, yes, a few times it was probably me.) However, with such thin crappy walls every time the smoke detectors went off it would take a frantic few seconds of running around to realize that it was downstairs or next door. It was that loud.**

We can still make all the noise in the world outside his bedroom door and he won't wake up; our obnoxious door bell won't wake him either. As long as the obnoxious noise isn't our voices because then he's awake in an instant.

So I need me one of these.

(Sucker.)


*Man nipples...are they useless? One of my girls swears that something like 40% of men have the ability to lactate successfully if the were given the right hormone supplements. J wouldn't try. Sometimes he's such a wiener.

**And I didn't just them assume it was safe. Of course I still checked it out.