You Are Beautiful

Posted on February 6, 2013 by Leslie Goldman

I spotted my first You Are Beautiful sticker inside the lip of a U.S. Mailbox. I opened it to send a bill and was greeted by a small, silver pick-me-up. “You Are Beautiful,” the mailbox told me. And I smiled inside.

Later that day, I Googled “You Are Beautiful stickers” and found a movement dedicated to making people feel good. You write in to a mystery P.O. Box; a few days later, five stickers arrive on your doorstep, ready to be pasted on a random subway pole, a park bench, the mirror in your local Cheesecake Factory restroom. It’s feel-good graffiti, and I dare you to slap a YAB sticker inside your locker at the gym and not walk away with a smile creeping across your face, as you imagine whose day it will make.

February is the 10-year anniversary of YAB, so I contacted Matthew Hoffman, the movement’s brainchild. When Hoffman was 23, the recent college graduate moved to Chicago with a graphic design degree and a desire to create a positive public art project. “There was so much the negativity in advertising,” he says, “and I was bombarded by it a lot more moving into city. I moved around a lot as a kid, was always the new kid, so I experienced those self-esteem issues, trying to figure out how to navigate life and make friends. I wanted to create something that said, ‘You’re OK just as you are.’”

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Traveling With a Baby is FUN.

Posted on January 23, 2013 by Leslie Goldman

In the months leading up to our first flight with the babe, my husband let all sorts of awful scenarios fill his head: Evie screaming her head off the entire way from Chicago to Mexico; us making our way through security while drawing death-ray stares from the child-free fliers behind us.

“Mostly,” he says, “my fears revolved around us being ‘that couple.’ I mean, we had a two-week discussion about whether to drive to the airport or strap our daughter’s car seat into a cab.” Breaking character, I remained relatively unworried: I just thought, “We’ll do what we need to do to get through the flight: We can always strap a bag of puffs to her mouth and let her watch an in-flight The Office if she gets fussy.”

As it turns out, Evie, at the time 10.5 months old, was a dream passenger, and is now on her way to become a miniature frequent flier. We planned our flight to correspond with her morning nap, I nursed her while taking off to keep her ears pressurized and she fell asleep just as The Odd Life of Timothy Green started playing. A notoriously light nap sleeper, she even made it through the pilot’s extremely loud and incredibly close greeting, which bordered on filibuster in its length. Dan and I were oh-so-pleased with ourselves as we settled in for the movie… until I made the embarrassingly rookie mistake of cracking open my ice-cold Diet Sierra Mist and woke Evie up 45 minutes into the flight. We hadn’t even passed over Kentucky and I was already in the dog house with my husband.

Keep reading over at The Bump…

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Think is your face on martinis

Posted on January 10, 2013 by Leslie Goldman

Step away from the vodka, Leslie

CNN.com just called for my take on the Scottish government’s new “Drop a Glass Size” campaign to curb drinking among women and encourage them to “to think about the health effects of regularly drinking above the recommended alcohol guidelines.” Included in the campaign: A “Drinking Mirror” app that shows users how they’ll age over time if they keep drinking three, six or 10 (or however many) cocktails a week.

The question they asked me: “Is it sexist to target women through vanity?”

My take: I actually don’t feel this is sexist. Men can upload their photos just as easily as women (I inputted my husband’s photo and watched him morph into a ruddy-nosed, double-chinned alcoholic caricature), and the website employs vanity-based pleas (“You’ll save 296 calories by switching to a smaller glass!” “The dehydrating effects of alcohol can leave hair, skin and nails dry and brittle,”) for both sexes. Sure, the writing is fuschia and they point out how much money you’ll have leftover to go shopping, but they also emphasize that too much booze is linked to sleep problems, fertility issues and an increased risk of breast cancer.

The fact is, women need (and deserve) special attention when it comes to alcohol: Rates of binge-drinking are rampant, our bodies metabolize alcohol differently than men, and liquor is often a factor in sexual assaults (used by both perpetrators and victims.) And showing people how a specific health practice will impact their looks is just downright effective. Remember those anti-drug ad posters that used to hang in the nurse’s office in middle school? The ones that showed a guy with half of his jaw eaten away by meth? Or this story from over the summer that showed a truck driver’s face, half of it marred by extensive wrinkling as a result of sun shining through the window, day after day, on un-sunscreened skin?

Now here’s a product I DO consider sexist: One-A-Day Teen Advantage vitamins. The formula marketed for girls promotes “healthy skin”; the one for boys, “healthy muscle function.” Because ladies only care about looking good and sports are just for guys?

As it turns out, CNN.com wound up using my public health-related quote, not my opinion on whether or not the campaign is sexist, but I thought it was worth talking about here. Now we just need an app that looks into the future and shows us how stupid we’ll look after that fourth glass of pinot.

 

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Sprout, Ninja, Tic Tac, Oh My!

Posted on January 8, 2013 by Leslie Goldman

In June of 2011, I found myself on the business end of an ultrasound wand, a grainy black-and-white image of a tiny little six-week-old poppyseed pulsating on the screen. It had taken my husband Dan and me no less than a year-and-a-half to get here, and our minds were exploding with excitement and nervous anticipation. The ultrasound tech verified that everything looked picture perfect, then tapped out the words Tiny Baby Alter (my married name) before printing a copy for us to take home and stare at for hours on end. From that point on, our baby would be known as TBA, a fabulous double entendre if I ever heard one.

Three years before that, my friend Julie named her daughter Tangerine. Well, technically, the birth certificate reads, “Leah,” but for nine months, Julie, Leah’s dad, myself and a few close friends all referred to that little nugget as everyone’s favorite palm-sized citrus fruit. Julie had read somewhere that, around 14 weeks, her fetus was approximately the same size as one of those Clementines, and the name stuck—to the point where, when I ordered her baby shower cake, I asked the baker to spell out “Happy Birthday, Tangerine!” in orange buttercream.

TBA and Tangerine are hardly members of an exclusive club: Legions of babies are branded with cutesie nicknames long before they see their first light of day. Kristen Skolar, 32, started calling her daughter Saucy after her 4-year-old niece dubbed her Hot Sauce. (Saucy is now 5-month-old Ella Dayne). Stacy Fleming’s son, Ian, began his life three years ago as Huevo. “At first, we called him Huevos, for the two eggs—well, actually embryos—that we had inserted,” recalls Fleming, 39. “Once it was clear it was only one baby, we changed it to Huevo!” An especially hungry mom called her little one Hoagie because he Continue reading →

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Adoption misconceptions

Posted on December 10, 2012 by Leslie Goldman

My friend Becca and her son, Trey

There aren’t many issues as emotional, complex and prone to verbal missteps as adoption. From the language used to the responses garnered by families, misconceptions abound. To honor National Adoption Awareness Month in November, we asked seven mothers and moms-to-be what they believed to be the biggest myths surrounding the process … and why everyone should take a second look at this extraordinary way of creating a family.

Myth #1: You can’t love an adopted child as much as a biological one.

When Ginny Wagner, now 55, and her husband began the adoption process in 2005, they already had a 4-year-old daughter named Olivia who was the sunshine of their lives. “We always wanted more children but I was 48 and not having any luck,” she says. The Crown Point, Ind., mom recalls being excited about expanding her brood, but admits to wondering, “If I already have a child, is it possible I can feel the same way about the adopted child as the one I gave birth to?”—a widespread misconception. “There was no need to worry. The strength of my love is the same for both of them. There’s absolutely no difference. You bond with your adopted child and love them exactly the same.” Now, she beams, “I just look at Sophie and think, ‘That’s my daughter.’”

Keep reading on Mom.me

 

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