Blog Posts by Valerie Isakova, Shine Parenting Editor

Makers of this baby bottle made no friends with their latest ad campaign.Over the past few days, bottle maker Bitty Lab sent out the following Tweet at least 12 times, according to an original story posted on Care2.com:

"New baby? Reclaim your wife. Meet BARE #air-free #babybottles Bittylab.com #bfing"

That tweet was followed with this one:

"Feeling like you're competing with your newborn for mommy's attention? Meet BARE #air-free #babybottles Bittylab.com #breastfeeding"

Where to even begin?

Annie Slaughter, the writer of the original Care2.com story, wrote:

"This offensive marketing tactic presumes that a woman, or at least her breasts, belong to a man. It also attempts to create a false competition between the baby and the father, when the father should be supporting the mother in providing the best care and nutrition for her baby."

Mom bloggers and Facebook commenters--women and men alike--were uniformly outraged and insulted. Some highlights are cataloged here.

We here at Shine had a moment's uncertainty, since we love the idea of a baby bottle

During filming on The Dark Knight Rises on Wall Street.My family and I live in New York City, and we stumbled into the filming of The Dark Knight Rises last summer on Wall Street. It was a beautiful day, the four of us were out for a stroll, and had a plan to stop by my husband's office building to change a diaper when we ran across an area of several blocks cordoned off for the movie. Since my husband had ID for a building in the area of filming, we were eventually whisked past the barricades and into a magically transformed area where the ground was covered with light snow and the streets were packed with commandos in dark clothing, holding guns. Here and there, tanks blocked the road. We were warned that there would be loud explosions. Eventually, post-diaper-change, we ended up with a hoard of other people huddled in the entrance at 40 Wall Street, hoping to see something scary happen. Our kids were too small to care, but my husband and I were transfixed by how totally the movie, even off-screen, transformed the street. The actors were

Pregnant women can now guilt-free enjoy their morning coffee. This is the best news we've heard all month: Researchers in Amsterdam have concluded that a woman's caffeine intake during pregnancy--i.e. coffee, beloved coffee, liquid gold, we mean coffee, did we say coffee?--doesn't cause problem behavior, hyperactivity, emotional and social problems or a host of other negative results later in life for the pregnant woman's unborn child.

As many pregnant women have discovered, skipping the morning caffeinated beverage can cause severe emotional and social problems for the mom. So, again, yay, coffee! No longer do we have to waddle enormously into the local coffee shop at nine months, ask for a decaf, and be told by the tattooed barista, with disdain, that the coffee shop is too purist for decaf.

The study was published this month in the journal Pediatrics and surveyed 3,400 mothers, whose children it followed up to age six. The results were unambiguous: "Caffeine intake was not associated with a higher risk for behavior problems or with

More middle-aged moms are partying, drinking and doing drugs.It was a rough weekend for being a mother, at least on the Internet. First, there was the novelist Amy Sohn's piece in The Awl about the new "Regressives." These are wealthy urban moms in their late 30s and early 40s who drink, do drugs, cheat on their husbands, complain a lot, and call each other Slut, Hooker, Drug Addict and so on while going to parties in bangs and strappy sundresses. The whole piece, in its excruciating entirety is available here. (And my favorite lighthearted and humorous reply to it is here, mea culpa.) The behavior described is sure to be widely derided, as was the author's intention, since Amy Sohn has a new, controversy-courting novel out about just such Real Housewives of Park Slope.

But even knowing that the "Regressives" were custom-ordered to shock, the story made me feel sad and anxious. I was worrying about it as I rushed around getting two adorable little people washed and into their pajamas before sitting down to a home-cooked dinner in our

By Valerie, A test post to manage images

Miss Mandalay Bra

My favorite bra.

Anthropologie Barrettes

These are cute.

Rory Staunton, who died of sepsis in April, 2012.
The story of 11-year-old Rory Staunton of Queens, New York, who suffered a routine cut on his arm during basketball practice and died four days later of septic shock --after being sent home from the emergency room at NYU Langone Medical Center--is a cautionary tale for parents.

Related: Faith healer parents let son die of treatable illness

In a statement just released to Yahoo! Shine, Rory's parents, Cieran and Orlaith Staunton write, "Our beloved son Rory was the light of our lives. He should never have died. It is clear to us he did not receive the basic standard of care which would have saved him and which he, as an innocent child, above all, had a right to expect. Our beloved boy is gone but we want to ensure that no other family experiences the utter heartbreak and grief we have because of such substandard care." The Stauntons have announced their intention to pursue Rory's Law, which would require hospitals to discuss the results of a child's blood work before

The picky eater, explained.Parents of picky eaters, take heart. Stephanie Lucianovic, author of the new book "Suffering Succotash: A Picky Eater's Quest to Understand Why We Hate the Foods We Hate" has gone on record saying it's not our fault our kids are picky.

For me, as a mother of two, this is both great news and something I already suspected. My daughter seemed to be born a picky eater. When she was a baby and I, assiduously following the advice of parenting books, started introducing carefully homemade, organic vegetable purees, her very first response when the first spoonful passed her lips was a comedic shudder and a terrible face. We all laughed and kept trying but to no avail. She shuddered for sweet potatoes, she scowled at squash, she spat out pureed peas. Even the mildest, prettiest, blushiest-pink home-made puree of pears got a big yuck. If it was green or brown, not only would she not eat it and not even try it, she wouldn't deign to see it.

When, a few years later, we stuck the first spoon into

The fireworks extravaganzas celebrating America's 236th birthday that you'll see in this slideshow are the country's biggest, best, loudest, most explosive, longest-running, most unusual or most spectacular. But they have one thing in common with the events happening all over America on July 4th: Large or small, they're a celebration of our country, our families, our armed forces, our shared national history, and our great glee in things that go bang.--Valerie Isakova More on Shine: Fourth of July guide to finding free fireworks