Wednesday, December 14, 2005

The Baby Mozart effect

I'm not sure how many people read this blog but I am assuming that most of them don't have children. If you do or if you have a dark sense of humor you will enjoy this. I got a good kick out of it because she writes about her son using albuterol and how the side effects make turn him into a shrieking baby banshee. Stella, my three year old also uses albuterol and I have witnessed the same symptoms. We even nicknamed her "Baby Hulk". Be sure to check out the video at the end of A Little Pregnants article.

A Little Pregnant writes: You know, an awful lot of people are crazy about Baby Einstein videos. We were given one — Baby Mozart Music Festival — as a gift when Charlie was born, but as I was, I thought, implacably opposed to exposing him to television of any sort at this age, I hadn't even taken it out of its wrapper.

Then one evening Charlie started albuterol. A single hit turned him into a whirling dervish — well, a crawling dervish — of a shrieking baby banshee. Documented side effects include aggression, agitation, dizziness, excitement, increased heart rate, irritability, and overactivity.

Irritability and overactivity. If we'd had a chandelier, he'd have been swinging from it. If we'd had a radiator, I would have chained him to it. If we'd had a blowgun and some rhino tranqs, I would have — wait, even I have standards. Instead, as hour two of the post-albuterol rampage began, I did what the friend who'd sent the video suggested: I Einsteined him.

Einsteining, says our friend, is what he does to his son when he needs him to sit very, very still and very, very quietly. From Charlie's behavior I extrapolated that Einsteining is also the thing to do if you need to sedate your child enough to perform the most delicate of neurosurgery without the modern blessing of chemical anaesthesia. [Read more]

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