I was in school for, like, forever. So I know a thing or two about books. And I was in school so long that they let me teach people who haven’t been in school as long as I was, and so I know a thing or two about telling people that they must read books.<\/p>\n
It is, some would say, one of my more irritating qualities – pestering my students, and sometimes members of the general population, including my husband, with the admonition that they must always, always read the book. No getting around it. No, I don’t care that you heard that The Matrix is, basically, Plato’s Republic in a cinematic nutshell (Gah! It’s not!) You must read the book.<\/p>\n
Say it with me. You. Must. Read. The. Book.<\/p>\n
If you like, you can join me in whacking my head against the wall as I repeat this. Over and over. Or, maybe you could go look up ‘irony’ in the dictionary and read the definition aloud to me.<\/p>\n
I finally looked up Harvey Karp’s book, The Happiest Baby on the Block<\/i>. I figured, might as well. I’ve been pushing it on everybody. Hadn’t read it though. Saw the movie. (Which I highly recommend, BTW. I really did see it, so you can trust me on this.)<\/p>\n
But I did not read the book<\/em>. Why does this matter, apart from the issue of intellectual and pedagogical integrity? Because I’ve been polluting the blogosphere with my manic rants about how swaddling (which I learned about from the Dr. Karp movie) is becoming less effective as Baby gets older, how she keeps busting out, how I’m totally anxiety-ridden about how I’m going to wean her from the swaddling, blah, blah blah. And because having polluted the blogosphere with this crap I finally follow MY OWN LINK to the site for the book and discover that it has a chapter with a sub-section that addresses “how to wean your baby off the 5 S’s” (swaddling is, if I have to explain this to you, one of the S’s). That’s right. The goddamned book has a goddamned how-to.<\/p>\n That sound you hear is me continuing to whack my head against that wall.<\/p>\n ‘Cause while I love this girl, to, like, infinity and beyond (the Husband hates when I say stuff like this, BTW. Says it’s so extreme as to defy comprehension and so meaning. He prefers ‘completely.’ Nice and straightforward.) So, although I love her COMPLETELY…<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/photos1.blogger.com\/blogger\/7878\/2181\/320\/Emi%206%20012.jpg\")
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