Mothering Magazine's website is offline at the moment, so I'll be outraged for them:
Every little girl wants to be just like Mom and now she can! Girls will love playing Mommy with the Minnie BOP mini-nursing pillow, sized just for her. These cute pillows are soft and cuddly, and come in fun patterns your girl will adore, from fairy princesses to beautiful ballerinas. Each Minnie BOP comes with a bottle and burp cloth to bring playtime to life.Why is this nursing pillow only for girls? Don't boys want to be like Mommy, too, and feed the baby? What about giving boys the chance to be fairy princesses and beautiful ballerinas and wear tiaras? What kind of throwback, barefoot'n post-partum, Friedan-hating ,gender-biased servitude is this?
How'm I doin'? Did I miss anything?
The Minnie BOP is available in some truly fantasy-tastic fabrics for $32-42 [minniebop.com via liz at mom-101, who I met f2f today. she rode in in a stretch limo with a carseat, no lie.]
I was more outraged about the bottle.
isn't the whole point of a boppy to facilitate breastfeeding?
My son uses one of those travel pillows which are shaped just like a miniature Boppy(tm) to feed his little IKEA bear at his breast. Then he burps the bear over his shoulder.
"Did I miss anything?"
Er, yes. The bottle. Once again, bottlefeeding is shown as the norm, when it shouldn't be. The latest Mothering has a great article and photo essay on the ubiquity of bottles in advertising.
[I'm trying to remember where/when I saw the photo of the boy pretending to nurse his Capt. America doll, er, I mean, action figure. -ed.]
So is the toy boppy for little girls to pretend-breast-feed their dolls, then?
Are today's children breastfeeding their dolls for such a lengthy period of time that they require pillows?
Do your kid a favor. Assemble a makeshift doll sling from any old piece of fabric. Not only will it provide mobility, it will help support the weight of your child's heavy cement dolls better than any silly pillow.
[but then they might start breastfeeding their dolls in public and make Barbara Walters uncomfortable. -ed.]
My son breastfeeds his toy bear, just like kelli's. He uses the big Boppy, though, which looks like a lifeboat.
He's not the best example of things anatomical, though, since he's convinced, at two and a half, that his sister and I will grow penises when we get older.
Make me kind of glad my daughter is into dinosaurs and pirates (I'm keepin' my eye on you, Johnny Depp!).
Although, because of the skull and crossbones, she now calls skeletons "pirates"
I was that kid walking around the mall with my a stuffed animal shoved up my shirt nursing it. It's one of my mom's favorite memories of motherhood :)
My 28 month old daughter uses a Bucky travel pillow as a Boppy for her robots and naked Mego Hulk. We found an actual Boppy in miniature at a garage sale but I think it might be an infant headrest? She prefers the cushiness of the other one, in any case. She has also been saying "Aye Matey" and "aaargh" a lot lately and is comfortable with her feminine side, too, since she constantly reassures her naked Barbies that everything will be okay once they save Baby Jaguar...
Actually you're missing the fact that a certain group of the Mothering crowd actually boycotts Boppy b/c they've been too much marketing that shows babies getting fed with bottles instead of breasts. So you should have approached it from the Boppy is doing again angle and then huffily say My Breast Friend pillows would never do this.
One of the most confusing, cute, and disconcerting images in my memory is one of our toddler lifting up the corner of his shirt to breastfeed his pink, knit pig (like a teddy bear.)... so cute, so .... disturbing.
But at least he knows 'breast is best'.
Wait. Are you Tori Amos' dad??
(of course, I cannot find a link to that album cover ANYWHERE)
I'm more offended by the limo. The nerve!