Plastic Nature

I was flipping through Wondertime magazine yesterday and came across an ad for a "European Inspired" baby bath. It was so gimmicky that it made me a bit sick, but that phrase was nothing compared to the tag line at the bottom of the ad. It claimed that the bath made the baby feel like she was back in her mother's womb. Really? Do babies need to feel like they are in the womb to have a bath? Did my womb feel like a plastic bucket full of soapy water? How many babies did they survey to come up with their claims ;)

It constantly surprises me that a country so firmly entrenched in unnatural baby and child rearing practices still tries to claim that it wants natural experiences/products for their babies and children. Is it so important to a mother who feeds her baby synthetic food out of a bottle that bath time remind her baby of before it was born?

On a related note, I read an article about the negatives of Similac's organic baby food. Apparently, it's the only formula on the market that uses cane sugar to sweeten it. Pediatricians are horrified because it makes the babies only want super sweet things, it's worse for their teeth, and because an early sweet tooth can lead to childhood obesity. There are claims that they are doing it to get babies addicted to the sweetness and beat out the competition (Baby Crack anyone?). The mother they profiled in the article was a joke. In the first lines, they say she is a natural mother and proud of it. They go on to say that as soon as her baby was born, she went straight for the organic Similac because it was natural. WHAT? If she was truly a natural mother and she had a real, pressing reason to feed her newborn anything other than breastmilk, wouldn't she have mentioned it? If it were me, I would have felt obligated to lay out my medical reasons for having to choose formula because otherwise the term "natural mother" would seem like a lie...