Erin Braid

I wrote a little history of washing dishes, from scouring pewter with horsetail to the Chicago World's Fair to modern environmental concerns. You can read it at Works in Progress! I'm also happy to report that the topic was thoroughly baby-approved. worksinprogress.co/issue/inventin…

@polisisti E.g. nejm.org/doi/full/10.10…

@polisisti For your collection: in the context of pregnancy and birth there's "expectant management"

I collect terms for "doing nothing on purpose": "active surveillance" (modern medicine) "masterly inactivity" (British empire) "strategic patience" (Obama on N. Korea) "benign neglect" (U.S. race relations) and now this:

@NinaPanickssery Nope no babies here

has anyone seen the baby

@teachermother1 Love this! Big fan of Nesbit, Alcott, and All-of-a-Kind Family. I also really enjoy having lists of (nearly) all the books I've read since middle school, so I love that yours will have them from even younger!

Speaking of books, here are the books my younger three kids read this year that I managed to catch and record, in case you are looking for summer reading inspiration. 8yo:

@S_OhEigeartaigh More power to you, I gave up the relatively simple "McCloskey". The most notable issue was when I lived in the Netherlands and it constantly got separated into "Mc Closkey" to match the tussenvoegsel system there. Technically that alphabetized me under C!

As someone corrects one misspelling of my name to another misspelling of my name for the 23rd time this week, my wife reminds me "You know, you could have chosen to become a Bates". "Actually dear, I think you'll find that under Article 16, Subsection 4 of the Good Friday Agreement, any UK Government document is obliged to include the accents and weird capitalisation. Principle, dammit."

@notanastronomer "Write my emails for me. Make some mistakes"

all the typos in my emails are proof that they are 100% artisanal human-produced nonsense

@Romy_Holland I assume it's not possible because we don't have a non-destructive way of reading a cell's dna, and sperm are just the one cell?

i’m surprised nobody is doing sperm selection as embryo selection lite. my guess is this has about 30% the utility of embryo selection, but it’s much less costly in multiple ways.

@maiab Same

like half of my texts with Dave are just pictures of our kids when they were little

My baby's favorite movie is the animated instructions at the self-checkout. Cathedrals everywhere I suppose

@FiredUpCoug And the other half of the fun was fitting 11 pages into 10 with 0.9in margins

Kids these days probably don’t even know how to make micro-adjustments to their font sizes and page margins. Back in my day, half the fun was figuring out whether you could turn a 9-pager into a 10-pager without the teacher realizing you set Times New Roman to 12.3 pt.

@drethelin Not just human anymore, I was in a waymo that sped up to make it through a yellow light!

The human instinct to step on the gas when you see a yellow light is sort of fascinating once you start thinking about it

@maiab You probably already know this, but like, you don't have to correct her if you hate doing it, she'll figure it out by herself. Worst case scenario, "zip it down" becomes part of the family lexicon for a few years (adorable)

I hate having to correct my two year old when she generalizes incorrectly and I have to explain how irregular English is. even though we “zip it up” we don’t “zip it down”.

@Romy_Holland Imo this is fine, in that I wouldn't worry if I heard that someone was doing this, but I wouldn't personally do this (whereas I would go over to a neighbor's place with a monitor). I'd prefer to be able to get to my baby within a few minutes if they start to cry

parents: is it okay to take a 15 minute shower while your baby is asleep for the night? you won’t be able to see/hear the monitor.

@Romy_Holland Well we have an older monitor and the signal wouldn't reach that far lol. Otherwise seems obviously fine. We've gone to the apartment below us for dinner and just brought the monitor, it's great

parents: imagine you’re good friends with the neighbors 2 doors down. would you put your baby down for the night and go neighbor’s house for a drink if you brought the baby monitor?

My mother and my baby, ~1.5y ago and yesterday. Some of my favorite pictures ever. Happy mother's day!

Vacuous truth in advertising

@utotranslucence Tricky one. I imagine that parental effort can get you from like 5% of babies sleeping through the night to like 80%. Objectively that's a lot of parental control, but not enough that I would tell parents in general "You control this"

Do you think that (barring medical issues and being too young a baby to sleep through the night without eating) parents can basically control whether children sleep through the night? (only answer if you have kids)

Developing a theory that ppl are reflexively anti-progress bc it's a reasonable generalization from childhood. As a kid you had 1000s of ideas for improving the status quo, like "pour milk on the couch" and "throw plates out the window." You had to learn that they had downsides!

Now that Rock-a-bye Baby is definitely my lifetime most-sung song, I'm wondering what it used to be. The obvious contenders (happy birthday, national anthem, school song) seem pretty weak when I really think about them. But what else would it be?

@justalexoki @selentelechia I'm very glad I established that we would be a no-pets family long before kids. I made it clear while my partner and I were still dating lol

@selentelechia same here honestly

this is probably my worst tweet but i honestly can't wait for our cats to die. ever since we got our kid they've been nothing but a nuisance. all they do is make a mess and cost money. i just don't care for them at all anymore. it's weird