Has anybody else noticed that out of nowhere, without warning or acknowledgment, Huggies stopped making their regular diapers with the stretchy tabs?

For months, I forked over the extra money to get Huggies. The Target brand were decent diapers, but those stretchy tabs on the Huggies were simple miracles of modern science that made them fit better and prevent leaks more efficiently. So despite my decidedly cheap ass, it was more than worth the $20/box for Huggies vs. $13/box for the Target junk.

But now, the tabs? They don’t stretch. If I want Huggies with stretchy tabs, I have to buy the premiums. No thanks. My name isn’t Rockefeller. I’m buying the store brand now, and that savings is going to add up. In fact, after 150,000 boxes of diapers, I’ll have saved over a million dollars. And then I will buy Oklahoma, and you’ll be sorry.

Looking around my living room, it’s like a Benneton ad, with all of the multi-cultural toys laying around. We’ve got Mr. Roberto the school bus driver, Paco the guy with the dump truck, Bernard the African-American student and Margie, the red-haired girl in the wheelchair. Not a lot of white dudes represented.

But what happens when the door breaks off of the school bus? That’s right, gotta call the greasy Fonz look-alike who came with the sports car toy.

Luckily my son will have all of the media and most of politics to give him good representations of how white guys in America are supposed to act. WHEW!

I just read in Parenting Magazine (tagline: “What Matters to Moms”) that modern Dads now spend up to 7 hours a week caring for their children, a statistic which is up dramatically from 1987 when the magazine started.

So let me get this straight: Out of the 112 waking hours in a week, most Dads spend 7 of those hours taking care of their kid(s)?

I spent more than 7 hours today taking care of my kid, and it’s only 3 in the afternoon.

C’mon Dads, get to work.

So I dunno if you ever really hit the BabyRoadies Forums…I know some folks did, and there was actually some good advice going on in there, but if you’ve seen it lately, you know that weeds have taken over the garden:

So since managing the spamalanche would take us a million years, we’ve decided to abandon the forums altogether.

And while we’re on the topic, can this business model actually work? Blindly barraging a forum with nonsense and URLs in the vain hope that one in a thousand will click on your Full Tilt Poker or Dick in a Pussy Mature links? Then what? You get one one-thousandth of a CPM? Then what??!?!!? The click-through rates can’t be that lucrative. How do these fuckers sleep at night?

Zac recently wondered if there was much difference between the way kids behaved in the 50s and the way kids behave today. And while that’s still up for debate, a new study says modern dads are pretty much the same as the dads of the 50s:

Two US researchers from the Universities of Florida International and Miami, Finley and Schwartz, have “redone” Parsons and Bales’ famous 1950s study on fatherhood (Volume 7, No.1, 42-55 of Psychology of Men and Masculinity, 2006).

The outcome of the revisit is surprising in that it is surprisingly similar to the outcome 50 years ago. Examining the “characterisation of the fathering role”, Parsons and Bales found this centred on so-called “instrumental” functions. That is, fathering was more about providing income, protection and discipline, than it was about “expressive” functions. These, the more emotional aspects of care-giving, were found to be largely motherly functions.

The article goes on to point out that while dads these days aren’t doing more than their pops and grandaddies before them, the moms of today are sharing the “instrumental” functions while continuing to be the primary “expressive” caregiver.

This begs the question, are those of us who think we’re renaissance fathers with our daddyblogs and Baby Bjorns really just blowing smoke up each other’s asses while perpetuating the traditional parenting paradigms? Or, is it possible that the study is flawed, and this latest crop of dads is truly as evolved as we pretend to be? After all, guys who’ve only become dads in the past five years are a drop in the bucket of the total number of fathers in the world. Could we simply not yet be a large enough sampling to make an impact on a study conducted today?

Are we the future or are we woefully stuck in the past? Discuss.

In our travels last night, PJ and I stumbled upon Once Upon a Child which is a resale shop for kids stuff (kinda like a used CD store, but slightly less interesting to me). They had a whole bunch of gently used clothes and baby shoes (’cause really, who’s walking around in newborn shoes anyway?), and also a bunch of really trashed but still functional strollers (“$25 As Is!”).

They also carry maternity clothes — PJ looked at a pair of jeans at Mimi Maternity in the mall for $35, and we saw the exact same pair at this place for $10.50. Gently used, but the crotch area was just fine (something I would have never thought to look for, and therefore would make a horrible pregnant woman).

It looks as though they have pretty strict standards as far as the quality of the items they buy back, all of the clothes we saw were in really nice shape and fairly stylish (no Brady Bunch collars or velour onesies).

It’s on Washtenaw and open seven days a week.

Please note: I am not getting paid by them. If anything they’ll end up getting a chunk of my money.