Mr. Limbaugh, I am not a slut for using contraceptives

I am a woman who planned her family carefully, so that we would not be an undue burden on society when my husband and I chose to have children. We had been married for almost 4 years before our first child was conceived, and have been together very exclusively for nearly 16 years. How long has your most recent marriage lasted, sir?

Your non-apology is not acceptable. You repeatedly point out your "problem" with insurance paying for contraceptives, medication that has many other usages other than simply preventing pregnancy. Where is your outrage over the same insurance companies (who often do NOT cover contraceptive medications) offering unquestioned coverage of medications the sole purpose of which is to make MALE reproductive organs behave in a different way than nature is directing them to? Why is Viagra OK for the rest of us to pay for, but not contraceptives? The ripple effect costs of Viagra are MUCH higher, in fact - since it increases the chances of the female partner becoming pregnant, thus putting the insurance company (or Medicaid) on the hook for prenatal care, childbirth expenses, and the associated costs of that new human being. This is why, when all is accounted for, the insurance companies actually really don't have a problem with footing the bill for contraceptives - it SAVES them money. It saves ALL of us money, when there are not more unhealthy, unwanted pregnancies happening in our country - that result in medical complications and births that the state and/or other hospital users wind up bearing the costs of instead. In my own state, about half of all births are paid for by Medicaid last I looked. If a laboring woman goes to a hospital without insurance, they can't turn her away so they wind up writing off the cost of the birth - by passing on the expense via increasing the costs of other hospital services that people who CAN pay need. We all lose.

I am also asking anyone who reads this to not send me any gifts from ProFlowers until they pull their advertising from Mr. Limbaugh's show, and advising that you think hard about whether to use their service at all with others whom you'd like to send a gift in the near future. When contacted regarding the controversy, they have been sending the following robo-reply email (I verified it is verbatum what others have posted):

Thank you for your feedback. We spend our advertising dollars across a wide spectrum of media channels. The views and opinions of the media outlets and personalities we advertise with are not necessarily those of our company.

We simply wish to delight our customers with fresh and unique gifting products, and that will continue to happen to the best of our abilities.

My response:

If the views and opinions of the media personalities are not in line with those of your company, then I respectfully ask that you cease advertising during their show. If anyone sends me flowers from ProFlowers before you cease advertising on that vile man's show, I will refuse delivery. As far as I'm concerned, you're as effectively calling women who use contraceptives prostitutes as he is, and that does NOT make me want flowers with your logo on it. Being treated to gender slurs for expecting that insurance companies that cover medication for erectile dysfunction will also cover medications that benefit WOMEN'S reproductive organs is NOT something that "delights" me, and until your company ceases advertising with the spewer of such vileness, I will envision your logo on Rush Limbaugh's face every time I see it. While that may be a UNIQUE image, it is not fresh nor delightful.

I encourage all of you to push companies you do business with to have the courage of their convictions, and ask them to find better ways than hatemongers to promote their goods and services.

Uproar over new Lego Friends sets

So, I've been hearing (well, mostly reading online.. and making myself) a lot of fussing especially from mostly Adult Fans of Lego (aka AFOL) about the new Lego brand "Friends" line that is targeted specifically at girls (read what you may into the fact that my biggest problem with it is NOT the gender stereotyping of the activities presented - my biggest issue has to do with functionality of the humanoid figurines. I've always been much more of a nerd than a feminist.). Even given that, I was still surprised to get the following email from change.org - and really bothered by the level of inaccuracy in the claims they make about the product. It concerns me because now I will be questioning the veracity of the claims they make about much more important issues than children's toys (though, as a sociologist-in-training specifically interested in child development and symbolic interactionism, toys are a VERY important issue to me - ESPECIALLY those that are targeted specifically to one traditional stereotype subset of gender).

The text of the email was:

Tell LEGO: Stop marketing sexist toys to girls Dear Ahmie, Iconic toy brand LEGO recently launched a new line of toys meant just for girls -- but two young women, Bailey Shoemaker-Richards and Stephanie Cole, think the products are unfairly "dumbed down" for girls. The new line is called LadyFigs, and it's made up ofbusty, pastel-colored figurines that come with interests like shopping, hair-dressing, and lounging at the beach. The uninspired toys even come with pre-assembled environments -- so there is no assembly (or imagination) required. Bailey and Stephanie say they're frustrated that LEGO is pushing outdated gender roles on girls and cheating them of the opportunity to build and discover. So they took to the internet, blogging about what they call the new "Barbielicious" LEGOs andpetitioning the toy company to lose the sexist LadyFigs line and go back to empowering both boys and girls with its original products. Click here to sign Bailey and Stephanie's petition today. LEGO hasn't always thought its toys were only for boys. In the 1980s, the company was actually celebrated for a major advertising campaign that spotlighted a young girl and her LEGO creation with the tagline "What it is is beautiful." But since then, LEGO reversed course and decided to market its products only to boys. The company claims its research shows girls just don't appreciate the original LEGO line. But Bailey and Stephanie argue that with LEGO's renewed emphasis on boys -- featuring only boys in its ads and stocking products in the boys' aisles of toy stores -- it's no wonder young girls wouldn't think LEGOs were meant for them. Bailey and Stephanie's fight to get LEGO to return to its gender-neutral toys is already making waves, with the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Time weighing in on the issue. But LEGO is stubbornly holding its ground and told Business Week that the LadyFigs launch is a "strategic" move to "reach the other 50 percent of the world's children," as if girls have never been part of LEGO's focus. Public pressure can prove LEGO wrong. If enough people sign Bailey and Stephanie's petition, it could convince LEGO that the new LadyFigs are bad business and the company should return its focus to empowering boys AND girls with toys that inspire creativity and innovation. Tell LEGO to stop selling out girls -- sign Bailey and Stephanie's petition today. Thanks for being a change-maker, - Shelby and the Change.org team

My reply (which I suspect may have gone to an unmonitored email address - I didn't research who to reach Shelby specifically yet and am unlikely to get a chance to tonight - hopefully I will remember to do so tomorrow) was:

I don't know if this message will ever be read, but I feel the need - as an Adult Female Fan of Legos and mother of three sons ages 7 and under, to clarify some inaccuracies in your email.

First, the sets do NOT come pre-assembled. Basic investigation reveals that they are full of standard bricks in addition to the human-esque figurine. The other parts are standard Lego products, and work fine with any of the other sets they've made in the last 30 years and beyond for the most part. The tools are the same size as standard minifig tools, in fact most of them are actually from the same molds as long-existing parts, just in new colors. The $10 sets have about 80 pieces each, of which only four are the humanoid figurine. Many AFOL (Adult Fans of Lego - gender neutral but mostly males) plan to buy the sets and get rid of the dolls, because the sets themselves are actually quite a nice assortment of parts. The Cafe set will be finding its way into our own expansive Lego village. These sets actually have more complex builds than many of the sets targeted to boys or gender-neutral over the years (many of which are in our own large personal Lego collection). For instance, the Harry Potter series sets often had large prefab wall pieces that offer much less repurposing flexibility than what is in much of these sets (though as a caveat: that's not apples-to-apples entirely, as I have not had chance to examine the most expensive set currently on offer on the Friends line - the house may have the same pre-fab walls like much of the Castle/Kingdom/Harry Potter sets used; I can't tell from pictures). They are comparable in complexity, from all appearances, with the currently offered Superheros line Lego is offering.

Secondly, Lego refers to them as "mini-dolls" not "LadyFigs".

Third, this is just the first few sets to come out. Barbie didn't become a doctor or an astronaut for a LONG time after she hit shelves, I would predict that Lego will be having its Friends in space much sooner (and the new Series 6 Collectible Minifig set features a female surgeon along with the uber-pink blond-bombshell-in-space that I affectionately refer to as "astrobimbo"... baby steps, I guess...). Given that Lego is headquartered in a country that is lightyears ahead of the US in pretty much every indicator of social inequalities (I say this as a sociologist-in-training), I trust them to advance the cause of women pretty rapidly. The "Olivia" character seems a pretty competent budding scientist with a well-stocked personal lab (including microscope) in which she appears to have built her own robot, "Mia" with a little imagination becomes an animal rights activist, and "Emma" has a nice complex design studio that is NOT dumbed-down (yes, she appears to be designing fashions, but swap out the "whiteboard" piece - it is a standard shape available without the printing on it - and she could be a budding architect with the rest of the stuff in the $10 set... this would be the ONE time I am sorry to NOT have had a sticker instead of a pre-printed brick come out of the box).

As for Lego being in the "boys" part of stores, every Target and Toys R Us I have been in in the last decade has a "Lego aisle" (if not several) that has nothing but Lego products, many of which I, as a female, have considered as interesting as my husband and other Lego fans in my social circles have.

I do not hold Lego innocent in this at all - I am actually working on an academic research project that will hopefully be a published academic journal article about what I believe are the REAL roots of the "lack of affection" girls have for the standard minifigs - number one problem being the horrible gender imbalance in the Lego Minifig population (it's less than 20% female, and the female offerings generally are not as interesting and detailed as the average for the male offerings). I do believe Lego made many missteps in this new Friends line. I am severely irritated that they have less articulation in their joints than the minifigures do (their wrists don't turn, their legs don't move independently, and they can't lean backwards - I do not believe that evolution should reduce functionality) and the shape of the feet is problematic with positioning in relation to built components on baseplates, and they can't sit on the studs/pegs of the bricks and be locked into position like the minifigs can - all of these are functional design problems that they should have solved before going to market if they wanted to prevent the severe negative response they've gotten.

My personal opinion is that the company AND consumer base would have been better served by first bringing the standard minifig population into gender-balance via offering all-female minifig packs (similar to how they offer "battle packs" for various lines), making some new female face and torso designs, and releasing those as well as the already-available minifig hair pieces in every color option through their online pick-a-brick store at minimum (as a box set assortment similar to they have done with "community workers" and the "fairytale figures" sets for retail shelf purchase would be a good move too). THEN work on evolving the minifig - taller, rounder, more humanly shaped like the mini-dolls without losing the functionality of the minifigs, ESPECIALLY if it meant they didn't look somewhat anorexic (I do commend them on giving the mini-dolls a more realistic breast size than many other dolls-with-breasts on the market over the years, but those arms are scary-skinny in relation to the hand size, and the skinniness of the arms is why the physics of a functional wrist don't work). It is the lack of functionality that makes these mini-dolls less appealing to my 7 year old son (who, when given free reign to build three minifigs for $10 at our local Lego store generally goes for female minifig parts without prompting since he knows intuitively that he doesn't have as many of those as the male parts on offer). When looking at the Friends sets on the shelves at our local Target, once he realized they were actually Lego products (he was more confused by them not being in the Lego aisle and mini-dolls than by the actual content of the sets or color of the boxes), he was actually quite interested in playing with them. I have video recorded his initial impression at the store as well as his initial reaction to the mini-dolls themselves, and have his permission to share those publicly.

I will be reposting this message on my blog. I believe more discussion is better, all around, and that nothing is furthered by folks going off on a crusade based upon faulty first impressions.

Thank you for reading.

Ahmie

Mom, writer, Sociology graduate student, and AFOL - amongst other things.

I will be uploading the videos of my eldest child Liam (age 7.5 years) and his reaction to the products shortly and will edit this post to include the link when I do. If you have thoughts to share with me about this, please do so here on my Blogger blog (http://dragonmama.blogspot.com) instead of on Facebook or Google+ or wherever this might be reposted, so that the conversation stays in one place visible to all interested participants.

Ahmie

edit: update - after kids fell asleep I did some googling and sent a @ message on Twitter to ShelbyKnox with a link to this blog post, hopefully she sees it and comes to engage here, if time allows. She sounds like a busy woman.

Dear grumpy old male customer at Best Buy

I don't know what it was about me that made you feel entitled to interfere in my interaction with my four year old child while he was trying to figure out a game on an iPad. Perhaps it was simply because I'm female and you feel entitled to criticize anything any female does. Perhaps it was my attire (jean shorts, a Toy Story t-shirt, and sandals) that had you make assumptions about my social class, education level, church-going habits (we had attended a service on bullying at our church just a few hours before this, ironically), or marital status (tho the simple gold band around my left ring finger should have been a giveaway there). Perhaps it was my disability since I had positioned my mobility scooter in such a way as to shielding my child who was seated on the floor from becoming a tripping hazard - maybe you even assumed he wasn't mine since I am not able-bodied.

Whatever your "logic" was for stepping in to criticize my child and me for his sitting on the floor playing a game on the iPad, it was flawed. The fact that you were clearly a bully used to getting your way when you go to boss someone around was revealed in your refusal to back off and mind your own business after my REPEATED requests that you do so. That you then felt the desire to call in other authority figures - first suggesting the manager of the store, then even the POLICE, over a simple matter of a four year old playing with a floor model iPad in a place of public accommodation, revealed you to be not just an asshat, but a proud wearer of a scrotal necktie. The store staff was NOT thrilled with having to intervene and TELL you to mind your own business and look at a (GASP) different iPad, seeing as there were THREE on display. Your little stalker behavior of coming across the parking lot as we were loading my scooter and children into the minivan (yes, I saw you coming, and yes, the cell phone in my hand had 911 dialed with my thumb under the "call" button) was a total dumbass move and you're lucky I had the restraint not to throw the van into reverse and run your ass over, since it had taken quite a bit of restraint earlier in the store to keep from running your feet over with my scooter or braining you with my cane (though it seems like the tissue in that cranium might have been soft enough to not be much effected by the level of blow my limited arm strength is capable of delivering, so it wouldn't have really been worth the paperwork involved).

You should also count yourself lucky that I didn't video your ass and post you on YouTube, you twit. I refrained from even taking a picture of you to post here on my blog & Facebook feed.

Instead, you sarcastically wished us a nice day and I wished you a good life. Elsewhere. Preferably measured in air miles. And hopefully you'll think twice (or, heck, maybe even think FIRST) before harassing anyone who matches any of my demographic characteristics again. Because if you keep it up, sir, SOMEONE is gonna open a can of whoopass on you that your old brittle bones won't be liking. And of you invade someone's space the way you did mine, they well might be able to justify doing such to a jury, depending on who witnesses it.

Just sayin'.

Sincerely,

The DragonMama

On my 7th World Breastfeeding Week as a lactivist

I type this with my 14mo asleep across my lap, nuzzled up to my breast while his father snuggles the older two into unconsciousness. I'm exhausted but felt the need to post something, this may be rambling nonsense so preemptive apologies if it gets too tangenty.

It's been a wild seven years since my first, first week of August(aka World Breastfeeding Week) as a breastfeeding mother in 2004. Back then, my state didn't recognize the legal right of my baby to eat wherever he was when he happened to be hungry and I could have been asked to leave a store for feeding him. Now, I still might get hassled for it but at least there's a law in place (thanks in very small part to Liam and I going down to our state capital to testify for the legislation). Teeth to it would be nice sometimes.

We just got back from an exhausting trip to NYC (whose state law does, incidentally, have "teeth" - there's at least a stated fine for harassing people for breastfeeding) where we stayed with my bro-in-law, visited with my mom-in-law's friends (NOT my idea of a great time after driving 500 miles in 11 hours with 3 young children, to have to then drive MORE to sit around a table for more than an hour while people socialized in a language I can't understand... but... whatever. I got to see the Harry Potter exhibition with my kids before it leaves the continent so I can't complain TOO much, right?). The baby H.A.T.E.S. his carseat, and is only somewhat mullified by playing music (when I want to be listening to audiobooks, of course). I had just got a new cell phone (my first Android, because my 2.5yr old Blackberry was dying), and had a new stereo installed in the van so I could do hands-free calling, and wound up streaming music from my phone through the stereo via bluetooth since it was easier to switch back to the audiobook if Little Bear allowed me to. Luckily my kids don't insist on listening to "kids music" (Liam's favorite song is by Dave Stewart from the Eurythmics, Del's current favorite song is by Alanis Morrissette, and Col tends to want Take to the Sky by Tori Amos, which is a b-side from Little Earthquakes and my "theme song"). I wasn't even sure what was ON my cell phone's memory card, I'd just copied everything over from the Blackberry since I used some of them as ringtones. Turned out to have some stuff that made me sentimental, and brought out a little of the militant lactivist/DragonMama in me, possibly to the chagrin of some of the other people in the restaurants we dined in bwahahahaha (no you obnoxious Jersey Shore types, I'm NOT interested in your parenting advice as your inappropriately dressed teens act like total cretins in public, thankyouverymuch).

The music pulls me back to my younger, more-steamroller-than-diplomat days (err... yes... I *have* gotten better about it, believe it or not). I find that I've needed to find a balance point between the assertive no-I'm-going-to-do-what's-right-up-yours-if-you're-gonna-try-to-oppress-me attitude (tho yeah, that still comes out... pretty much daily, to be honest) and the let's-see-if-we-can-find-a-win-win-compromise-that-doesn't-make-me-want-to-vomit-from-compromising-my-integrity end that I fear I may have to cultivate if I ever want to be a college professor. Motherhood has really helped me learn to SEEK that balance point more, even if I still tip to the former quite often.

I had Tori's From the Choirgirl Hotel album playing today while running errands. The album was written after the musician had a miscarriage. I don't think I've listened to it beginning-to-end since becoming a mother myself. I almost started crying during Playboy Mommy. It hit me hard when I first heard it, years before Liam was conceived, but now it reminds me of how very blessed I am to have had uneventful pregnancies and healthy children (especially since we had a friend's 4 year old daughter in the van with us - the friend is newly pregnant again currently, had miscarried a very wanted child shortly before I conceived Col then got pregnant again, the new baby will be less than 2 years younger than that baby). It made me think of the bonds motherhood has formed between me and other women, both child-bearers and not, and how much it has made my maternal line mean to me.

This has also been on my mind today because my mother forwarded to me an article written about my grand-uncle (maternal grandmother's brother, my grandmother is the only one of her siblings to ever marry, her siblings were like additional grandparents to me), which deeply touched me that my uncle's work has survived to be appreciated more than two decades after his death. I wonder what kind of ripples my own life's work will have. If long after I'm gone someone has such kind words to say about me that my descendants can come across, that will tell them that my life was well-lived. I wish I knew more about Uncle Norvin, I hope that my descendants will know more about me (and that I'll live long enough to know more about them... he was only in his mid-60s when he died, I was in kindergarten).

The milk of human kindness flows in many ways, but our babies deserve it first from their mother's breasts. How, in this scary economy, can we make that possible for more women? I am blessed to have had the privilege to breastfeed my children full-term (biologically - other mammals do not wean their young before they have enough teeth to eat a full adult diet... ponder that the next time you hear someone say "that baby is too old to be breastfed". If they're still young enough to have jars of baby food marketed to them, they're still young enough to be fed the way they were born expecting to be nourished). How can we be more kind in a meaningful manner, with mothers who have so many barriers to the way they might want to live? How can we make it possible for the cashier at the grocery store (who mentioned that she is hoping to have another child while commenting on the coolness of the baby carrier - a traditional Chinese style one - we had with us) to breastfeed her own for as long as she might like to, without making her feel like we have no understanding of the complexities of her life that just BEGIN with the chaos of her work schedule? Meaningful, PAID parental leave when a child is born would be part of it, but making breastfeeding mothers feel welcome and accepted in public places instead of abiding the mentality of the few that breastfeeding should only be done at home, behind closed doors - that'd be a start, I think. We've got such a long way to go. I hope that we get there before I'm a memory like my uncle.

I loathe cell phone shopping... bring on the bathing suits

I am extremely finicky about my cell phone for several reasons, as folks who spend any time with me in face-to-face interactions tend to find out. OK, I'm extremely finicky about anything I spend more than about $10 on, especially if it comes with recurring expenses, truth be told.

I'm also rather annoyed that AT&T is buying T-Mobile. I've liked T-Mobile, we've been with them (well, with the company they were before they were T-Mobile and then with them) for seven years, since we moved back to Cleveland. They've given great customer service, the cell reception has been pretty much flawless unless I'm in an area where NO ONE gets cell service (and I often get it even where others don't, somehow), and their pricing structure has been quite good. I have not heard such glowing reviews from friends who have had AT&T, plus AT&T does lots of not-so-great things politically that I really don't want my household's money going toward, so I've been looking at alternatives.

And now we run into the problem. The problem isn't so much that other companies are charging too much for their service. Really, none of them has a plan that fits the way we use phones in our family well. We are heavy on the text, light on data - my mother is the only one of the five of us on the plan right now who even has data service - and VERY light on the phone conversations except for my mom and mother-in-law. We could seriously get by with all 5 of us on a plan with 1000 minutes shared as long as there were free nights and weekends. Toss in with Sprint that free nights start at 7 (I think that's what the girl just told me at the store?) and you can call any mobile number in the USA, any carrier, for free and we could actually probably get by with about 500min between all of us, and that's with my mom using her cell phone as her primary phone number. But they don't offer a plan with less than 1500 minutes that has data, don't have non-smartphone that meets my needs (and only one of the smartphones even really does and I didn't really like the way it felt in my hand), and the cheapest family plan would cost us nearly double what our current Tmo bill is.

URG!!!

Considering going pay-as-you-go with Boost or Virgin, but then I still am stuck with the phone-not-meeting-my-needs problem, though I think we would at least save money monthly, possibly. My father-in-law really doesn't need a phone with monthly minutes at all, one that we have to pay for every minute would be fine since it's just for emergencies and Boost lets you do that for 10 cents/minute from what I saw on their website. My mother-in-law only needs voice since she isn't English-literate enough to text if people WERE using proper English instead of txtspk (seriously, she calls us EVERY TIME we send her out to get toilet paper to spell out the name of the brand and make sure she's getting the right one.. Q-U-I-L-T-E-D N-O-R-T-H-E-R-N). My mom is addicted to her iPhone and likely isn't following us if we leave Tmo anyway from the last I heard (tho the Sprint girl said they're getting iPhones this fall so who knows).

So why am I having such a problem with phones? Ahhhh... here comes the REAL rant.

There are no effing mom-phones! I can get mom JEANS, mom UNDIES, mom BRAS... mom MOCHAS in won't-burn-the-kid-if-you-spill-it-on-them temperatures... holy crap the new 2011 Honda Odyssey seems like it may actually have been designed by an entire TEAM of mom-engineers, it's like the wet dream of any mom with 3 or more kids, I swear I had a little momgasm crawling aroud that thing in the fall when my 2007 Odyssey was in for a recall repair. LOTS of other aspects of the commercial world that CLEARLY have a little thought into at least SOME of the options that demonstrate "a mom of small children had some say in how this product came out". KUDOS to all of them. Cell phone manufactuerers? As far as I'm concerned, across the board FAIL at the moment and for the last several years.

Why? What would a mom phone have that is lacking in pretty much every single phone on the market right now?

A.) Don't make us sacrifice the goddamn QWERTY keyboard layout to get single-button-push speeddial. I do NOT mean push-button-to-speak voice recognition speed dial. How well do you think THAT works when you've got a toddler shouting for a fruit roll-up and the baby crying in the background? Yeah. Wonderful. I need to call my husband and ask him, in the space between the baby's shrieks, to please pick up an extra pack of bandaids on the way home. With the vast majority of phones on the market right now, to do that I either sacrifice QWERTY to have just the basic numeric keypad or I have to tap a crapload of times on a screen or slide-out keyboard to get to his entry in my addressbook (assuming that I have no yet had the braincells to rub together to think to put him at the top of the addressbook by putting a number before his name... why he won't be FIRST in the addressbook appears below). I sent fewer than 10 text messages in the NINE YEARS I had a cell phone before I got a QWERTY phone. I have been a touch typist since I was 16, my brain does not think ABCs when I'm trying to spell out a message, particularly when sleep deprived and covered in various forms of goo from my offspring.

B.) WHY THE FUCK CAN'T I HAVE A QWERTY FLIP PHONE?!? There have been, as far as I am aware, essentially THREE flip phones made in the last SEVEN YEARS that have QWERTY keypads: the LG Lotus (there were a couple different versions of this, I forget how many), the Blackberry Flip, and (currently the only one on the market and I *think* still being manufactured) the Blackberry Style. Why am I so obsessed with a flip form-factor? Multitude of reasons.

1. I close it and I know I hung up on the asshole that I currently want to strangle while I bite my tongue HARD to keep from dropping repeated f-bombs in front of the little featherless parrots flocking around me at every waking moment. The primary screen and keyboard are also protected as I throw the phone in a full-out Momtrum when those moments are REALLY bad. On my more calm, rational, sane days, the flip action protects the phone's main screen & keyboard from damage from being in my pocket, or used as a teething toy when I don't get it out of the baby's reach fast enough (or he just outright picks my pocket without my noticing it - his brothers act as distraction decoys quite well).
   
2. The pacifier in my pocket does not randomly decide to make a social call on whoever happens to have a name that starts with A in my address book (and as someone with an A name and the 2nd letter being earlier than most other A names so I wind up at the top of most of my friends' address books, pocket/butt dialing is rather a big pet peeve of mine). Sure, I COULD key-lock the phone, if I remember... or I could set it to automatically key-lock really quickly (which then annoys the shit out of me when I'm trying to use the phone amidst the distractions of aforementioned small children and take too long to dial the next number in the phone number I'm trying to read off a paper/computer screen and have to do key-unlock THREE TIMES in the process of trying to make ONE GODDAMN PHONE CALL - yes, this was my life before I switched to flip phones, and I made the switch when my eldest was barely a month old). For anyone reading this, regardless of phone type, a suggestion a friend gave me and I BEG of anyone with me in their phonebook to make: make the first entry in your address book named 1111 and enter your own cell phone number into it. At least then if you pocket-dial (or let your kid play with your phone - I don't let my little gnawers TOUCH mine but I have friends that apparently have better replacement plans on their phones who let their toddlers play with the devices, which results in my getting a lot of preschoolers breathing deeply in my ear) you're just annoying yourself with long somewhat intimidating sounding voicemail messages from your pocket contents. Keep the lint fairies happy and they won't threaten you with a shiv, that's my experience.
   
3. More mundanely, the sound quality on flip phones had generally been better than other phones, particularly for those of us who can't go around constantly wearing devices that are simultaneously electronic choking hazards AND diminishing our ability to track the suspicious little sounds of our kids causing chaos around us. I have to hold my phone to my ear when I'm using it, or use speakerphone (which I do when I'm driving, it's also why I have a different ring tone for pretty much every single person who calls me on a regular basis. If my general ring tone rings while I'm driving, it doesn't get answered. If I know who is calling, it depends on traffic conditions and how much that individual has annoyed me in the last week). I've tried at least half a dozen different bluetooth options, not a single one functions well enough for me to wear for an entire day while with my kids.

C.) Why the hell is it, when any phone even comes CLOSE to meeting mom-needs, it gets slapped with the crappiest camera of the entire line the manufacturer is putting out? Come ON! A mom-phone needs more than 1.3 effing megapixels. Don't be a jerk, cough up the 5-ers. I'm so damn tired of carrying around a separate camera. Since my iPod Touch is only a 2G, I have three electronic devices for a day out -cell phone, iPod in case the kids get bored or [insert sound of choir of angels] all three of them fall asleep at the same time in the car so I can get a little pleasure-reading in via the Kindle app, and the point-and-shoot camera. I'm actually waiting to see what the iPod Touch 5G has to offer in the way of a camera, if it's halfway decent (my husband has a 4G and I'd like better than that camera, thankyouverymuch) I will actually spend money on an Apple product for myself for the very first time in my life (and I've been a full-on techie sometimes employed in the field since 1993, no n00b here).

D.) I've never seen this one, but if some engineering folks at a cell phone manufacturer (or even just programmers) happen to read this and the above criteria were satisfied... an ability to LET my kids play with the phone when doing so will prevent them from sounding like a pack of rabid banshees while we wait in line at the post office that also locks them from all the other features of the phone would be WONDERFUL. I have an iPod Touch (which I got for free for opening a bank account last summer - I'm really not a fan of Apple after being a computer repair tech in the 1990s when they were proprietary-EVERYTHING and the bane of my existence... and I still pretty much hold the opinion that Macs are great computers only for people who can't be bothered to learn to actually learn to use and maintain a REAL computer... that's not a disrespectful thing, I understand that others live lives that keep them too busy to learn to defrag and such, and out-sourcing basic tasks via surrendering to having many fewer options in hardware and software with the tradeoff of that being that they've gone through more rigerous testing, that's totally our call. Me? I find going into the innards of my machine and cannibalizing it a very gratifying experience and I know how to set up software to run the maintainance tasks on a schedule without my having to think about it. And I prefer to be able to access a shitload more software, including more shareware and open-source stuff, and would install a Hackentosh if for some bizarre reason I needed to. Instead I triple-boot my main desktop with Ubuntu, Win7, and WinXP... it's usually logged in on Win7 since that's what we've got the most software for more family members running under). I would love an iPod preschooler-friendly app (or even *gasp* baby-friendly one... yes, I let the 13mo play with the Tesla Toy app on my iPod) that requires touching the screen in a specific sequence to get back out of the app. Pretty Please? Available on Android too? And can I get an Android phone that meets all of the above demands...er... requests?

Some manufacturer make this phone and you will not be able to keep them in stock. Don't be assholes and keep it locked to a single cell carrier or we may hunt you down to do many unpleasant deeds. It can even be the ugliest phone ever made, since we're generally all about the plastic protective covers anyway (pretty sure that's the only reason I've NOT had to replace my phone every six months or so, I'm OBSESSED with keeping the protective cover and screen protector on my devices). Don't even bother making them in multiple pretty colors. Glow-in-the-dark keys? Yeah, that'd be PRIME, since we use the phone to call the doctor at 3am and don't want to wake the baby by turning on a light to see the keys. Nice bright screen that works well as a flashlight - also a plus, similar reasons (our cell phones become flashlights for finding the baby in the dark nearly every night, particularly since the blackout curtains went up). Oh, and water-resistant... yeah... and durable to being teethed on, without little pieces that are likely to come off quickly and go down a baby's gullet.

Is all this REALLY too much to ask? Surely you can do it, for us, the loving moms of the world? You know, those people who tend to be the ones who make sure the cell phone bill actually gets paid in a timely manner?

Any other moms have features that would be in their dream mom-phone? And no, I don't think dads have quite the same criteria in phones, from what I've seen. I'm totally cool with getting clued in on what FATHERS would love to see in phone design too. All you iPhone fanatics who value form over function - uhh... go shove a sock in some orifice and twiddle your touch screens. I heard enough of your ranting about teh uuuuhgly of the Blackberry Style when it came out.