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2020-08-01 03:02 pm

What to Expect: The First Year by Heidi Murkoff

What To Expect: The First Year

3/5. The specific thing I liked about this book is the way of presenting milestones for each month by probability – something like your baby will probably, your baby will likely, your baby might, your baby might even. It gave me a better sense than other lists did of Casterbrook's moderately weird but not concerning rate and order of doing things. Otherwise, I skimmed chapter headlines in each month's chapter a few weeks ahead, and occasionally found something useful.

The thing is though, this book is for straight cis people. They have this little note in the beginning about how yes, they only refer to mom and dad, but all you weird queer people should just read in your family configuration, but they're definitely not going to make an effort to use inclusive language. Which, first off, fuck you. And second off, lol. The nouns are the least of it. I think peak this book is the bit about gender expression for toddlers which was like "haha, yeah, you well-meaning parent setting out to raise a baby who isn't sexist, that's cute, but girls grow up to be women and boys grow up to be men, and we're all born like that, and that's science, so there."

So yeah. Not for my family, and they pretty much told me so in the introduction.

Nota bien: Apparently there is a more recent edition than mine, but when you need accessible formats you take what you can get.
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2011-10-13 06:49 pm

What To Expect Before You're Expecting by Heidi Murkoff

What to Expect Before You're ExpectingWhat to Expect Before You're Expecting by Heidi Murkoff

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I didn’t totally hate this, even with all the mealy-mouthed cutesy bullshit (I say this solemnly and with purpose: if any of you ever
catch me unironically using the phrase “baby dancing” instead of just saying sex, do us all a favor and insert bullet into brain post haste, please and thank you). I didn’t even hate her complete aversion to showing her work and, you know, citing like a fucking professional. I
didn’t even hate the entire 50 words she devoted to noticing that,
ohmygosh, there are people planning to get pregnant who aren’t
heterosexual, monogamous, and married! Or even how thirty of those fifty words were misleading as to law and facts. (They didn’t even get in the same zip code as my circumstances, let alone the same ballpark, but go figure.)



Really though. If you’re writing a book to educate people about
pre-conception health, and I come stumbling along, fresh and blinking
and largely uneducated from a life of avowed childfreedom with all my
childfree friends, and your book on pre-conception health only manages to teach me four things I didn’t already know? You’re doing it wrong.






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