A week or so after my son was born, we had some friends over who were due to have their first son very soon after us. The experience of labor, delivery and post partum was fresh in my mind and there was a lot that the classes hadn’t prepared me for, so I wrote a long email to my friends with all the advice I could think of. I’ve forwarded that email to about a dozen people in the last year and nearly did it again on Friday when I realized I could put it on our baby blog and lots more people would be able to see it. Yes, it only took me a year to realize that. And I do this for a living.
Anyway, I posted it and a few days later found some rather inept comment spam from a company that makes electric butt sprayers or something. The comment went into excruciating detail about all the things that might happen below the waist of a woman who had just given birth, and why spraying warm water on most of it would be a good thing. It also provided a helpful link to their web site. I deleted it.
If the people who sell that product and are searching for blog posts about labor and delivery had spent just a little more time coming up with some useful advice for new parents that didn’t necessarily involve the spraying of warm water, I would have thought they were providing a valuable resource and contributing as a fellow traveler in the whole baby journey. Really, it probably would have taken them an extra 30 minutes to create something worthwhile. Instead, they created spam and got deleted.