DADWAGON

When I am not too busy with my day job, I occasionally dive into the Twitter for DadWagon. And today I ran across a company there–UpSpring–that makes a product called MilkScreen. I don’t know about the rest of their inventions–the toddler-tether and the hip-squeezer seem a touch absurd–but the idea behind MilkScreen is inspired: a home test that will tell you in a few minutes how much alcohol is in mom’s breast milk (not, as the post’s title might suggest, whether you’ve been drinking breast milk).

Does it work? Who the hell knows. But I love the idea: it’s trying to find out how much alcohol there is in the milk, not whether there’s alcohol in the milk. It’s a huge difference: in a world of baby products that try to deliver a ridiculous (and probably unattainable) level of safety and comfort for the kid, this one is designed to help nursing moms get their drink on.  Instead of having to endure an all-out prohibition on drinking while breastfeeding, women can figure out if they’ve had just the right amount of alcohol, or maybe even if they haven’t had enough: I’m testing low, honey, pour me another shot.

So what does too much alcohol do to babies? UpSpring has reposted a study from Pedriatics which mostly makes me feel bad for the test babies, not because they had alcohol, but because they were given ethanol instead of something yummy like 16-year Lagavulin.  Note to scientists: ethanol is for cars.

The moms in the study were no good at guessing whether their kids had been given alcohol or not. But the machines picked up that the babies were sleeping less after some of this ethanol consumption. Nothing more serious, just bad sleep. So maybe you shouldn’t dip their binky in brandy like our grandparents used to do it, but neither should you succumb to the current anti-alcohol mania (this comment thread seems typically hysterical, with lots of dubious warnings like “Babies… could DIE from alcohol poisoning from even a few drops”).

Anyhow, I am officially a fan of MilkScreen, and am eagerly awaiting future versions that I hope will let you know if your breast milk has an acceptable level of nicotine, goofball, whizbang, yellow bam, water-water, wet daddy, gorilla biscuits, polvo de angel, Mexican brown, chalk, crink, wolf, worm and all of the other little yummies my wife swore off while she was breastfeeding.