They don't call them mercury-amalgam fillings any more, I guess. But when my dentist had gotten through talking to me about a Hayley Mills movie in which the character she was thinking of was played by Wilfrid Hyde-White rather than the actor with whom I share a homonymic surname, and about the social problems faced by kids from the boonies going to high-powered colleges, she decided that the filling on the back of my left eyetooth should be metal rather than composite.
In countries where they use only composite fillings, she opined, they may not have as many crazy people, but dentists spend a lot more time replacing worn-out fillings. Then she dropped the little bit of dye paper that's used to swab out the drilled cavity and reveal the last traces of decay into the back of my throat.
"Oops," she said. So after the filling was finished I explained to her that my freshman-year roommate, who has long since become an anesthesiologist, told me during medical school that surgeons are trained to say, "There" whenever they make a mistake, so that "I have just transected the aorta and will now attempt to control the bleeding" sounds less liability-prone on the operative transcript.
I guess that's not something dentists have to worry quite so much about.
When I'm bouncing Charlie to get him to burp, or just for fun, he kicks his legs down and stands on my stomach -- not for long, and not without support to contain his drunken-ingenue careening from side to side, but holding up his own weight with his legs nonetheless.
So what do I say to him in meaningless praise? That's right. What would I say to our offspring if he had been born a girl instead? Smart? Graceful? Well-balanced? Mighty?
It really amazes me just how ingrained the gender-role assumptions are.
Charlie likes to sleep on my chest. Or in the crook of Julie's arm. Or halfway off my lap with my hand supporting the back of his head. Or anywhere else that requires us not to move a muscle for the next two or three hours. Put him down, wake him up. And start the whole baby-soothing process all over again.
We've gotten okay at moving him from some positions, but what we really need is a baby peel, so that we could slide him off us and onto some other bed like sliding a pizza out of the oven and onto the counter. Only Charlie isn't flat, so the the utopian peel would have to avoid disturbing him by sliding nanotechnological tendrils between him and whoever he was sleeping on.
Here's where most of yez can stop reading: I think that something like that is actually possible. And imagine how much parents like us would pay for an extra half hour or more of sleep (his and ours) every 24 hours.
The first part of the solution is to turn the problem around: if the peel is already between him and us when he goes to sleep, there's no need for sliding or creepy tendrils or whatever. It just has to be soft and squishy so it can mold itself to his contours, and then turn solid when he needs to be lifted.
That's where electrorheology comes in. Weave a bunch of tiny tubes containing your ER fluid into a blanket or a burp cloth, and watch it drape naturally when the switch is off. Turn it on, and Presto! a solid Charlie-supporting sheet that can carry him anywhere without disturbance.
OK, there's the high-voltage problem, and the question of whether the fluid is strong enough (you could always just make a thin sheet entirely filled with the fluid, or use the fluid to lock the joints between links of some stronger material, or one of any number of other tricks) and probably the expense and power-consumption issues, and the minor matter of toxicity...
In the ultimate nanotech world, of course, the electrorheological bib or its distant descendant would be self-cleaning, powered by tiny bots that consumed every blort of milk and spitup that landed on it.