Exploiting My Baby : A Blog by Teresa Strasser

There’s a social contract when it comes to birthday parties for kids. You can’t just be a recurring guest, enjoying the bouncy houses, gift bags and balloon animals arranged and paid for by other parents. No, you have to reciprocate. Like it or not, there’s a kid pro quo. Other parents helped you kill a [...]

Not making fun. Bless his heart.   Step aside, infamous Indonesian smoking baby, there’s a new gross-you-out and get-you-incensed Internet sensation in town. It’s the obese Chinese toddler! Perhaps you have seen photos of Lu Hao, a 132-pound 3-year-old who eats three bowls of rice at a time and refuses to walk to school. It’s [...]

The way I was going to dodge all the stereotypical haggard new mom behaviors, well, that didn’t really happen. It didn’t happen at all. Yeah, I hate the sound of my own voice saying things like, “I just want to shave my legs. Is that such a luxury?” Hearing myself make jokes about the spit-up [...]

Buster is one month old today. And I think I am finally ready to tell the story about the rabbi, my estranged mother and a bag of shit, and how this only partially holy trinity converged at my Koreatown home one Tuesday afternoon. When Buster was eight days old, we invited a rabbi over to [...]