They Also Grow Up To Print Pamphlets, I Bet

You get a lot of printed materials in the birthing classes for first-time parents, all of it filled with helpful and instructive -- and often extremely opinionated -- information.

We left each week's class clutching a new folder of photocopied data on why we'd be dooming our daughter to a life of squalor and dereliction if we failed to follow each recommendation to the letter.

So far we've whiffed on, I'd say, two thirds of what the nurse instructors said we absolutely had to do, and Veda seems just fine. But I'll be watching her closely for symptoms of brutal neglect and crippling parental ignorance; don't you worry.