These guys are awesome.  Take two guys, mix in frustration over not having any diaper bags that work with the guy in mind, and in one part masculinity and one part ingenuity, and what you get is the dadgear.com products.  These products are so cool that every hip rookiedad should get something like this for the gadget/innovation factor alone.

Highlighted at www.dadgear.com of particular interest are the messenger bags and the fleece vests.  What I especially like are the patent-pending built-in diaper wipes of the messenger bag and the built-in slim, sleek diaper changing pad that slips out of the back zippered area of the fleeces.

Let’s talk about the messenger bag first.

This thing is available in many cool styles.  For those guys thinking they’ll be relegated to the Kate Spade quilted diaper bag, specially made to immasculate any guy, put that out of your head.  The designs of this are sweet.  My favorite is “Dead Man’s Party”:

But there are a ton of designs available.  Some really unique features of the bag include a very compact and sleek diaper changing pad, enough pockets to house any number of must-haves from bottles and passies, to fresh diapers and toys.  A front pocket on the flap provides ample space for the random Sports Illustrated, Men’s Health or Fortune, and a wide strap ensures that all of the weight of the bag is distributed across the shoulder instead of thin strip of a strap cutting into you.  The best part of the bag is a quick access case for diaper wipes.  A patent-pending design allows for wipe refills while a clip-cover holds the wipes in place with a quick-to-open plastic flip lid.  This bag is not for amatuers.  It gets a 5 out of 5 stars from me for the coolness factor alone.  Honey – if you are reading this – be aware that I will be buying this thing unless you get it for me for our anniversary.  This thing is frickin’ awesome.  Other shots of the product are below….

Another cool product is their RookieDad-oriented fleece vests and jackets.  Though the wipes case is not quite as cool on these – just a pocket for compact wipes, the jackets and vests do feature a very cool back pocket across the lower back that houses the same-style compact changing pad.  No argument about it, this is not just a fleece vest.  It is designed with the dad in mind, with ample mesh pockets on the inside panels to fit several changes of diapers.  Don the vest, and you are good to go.  4 out of 5 stars for me.  The only way they could make it better is if they fashioned the diaper wipes to be quick-draw as in the messenger bag.  And for those fellas prone to be hot-natured, it would be nice if the pits and neck were breathable like most Patagonia vests and jackets.  All the same, a very cool product.

Messenger bag and vests run about $80 at www.dadgear.com.

Alright, I’m loving this gadget I got H. for Mother’s Day ’09 (my wife’s first Mother’s Day as a real mother!).  Essentially it is a highdef microphone localized under volume control with frequency-based ear phones that come in a set of two and plug into dual audio jacks on the front of the audio monitor.  This is an excellent device to – if nothing else – give you a reason to snuggle up together, block out the noise of the day, and strain to make out the beat of your baby’s heart.

Since we’re only at the start of the second trimester, largely what we’re hearing is the gurgling of her digestion, but the product promises that by the third trimester you can hear the actual heart beat and even the sound of nutrients passing through the placenta and hiccups from the baby.  What makes the product enticing is also the difference in how the sound resonates.  At the doctor, you hear Doppler or regenerated resonance of the sounds in the womb.  These give you the whooshing whokomp-whokomp-whokomp sound that you hear when the nurse presses the mic into your wife’s abdomen.  The sound you are supposed to hear from the audio output of BebeSounds is the actual sound of the heartBeat – as if you pressed your ear to the child’s chest.

Other plusses of BebeSounds are those that appeal to the parents who are looking to raise a Harvard grad – a guy can dream, right?  Included in the package is a band that velcros around the mother’s belly, under which the parents can slip speaker paddles that can be positioned on either side of the womb.  Through these you can either play the included classical CD with songs specifically selected to stimulate baby response and reactivity, or you be creative and play anything you like, including using the supplied microphone to talk to the baby.  Hundreds of case studies speak to the benefits of in utero parental voice recognition conditioning for post-delivery babies, its calming effects, and the speed of recognition of parents voices.  Case in point, dads get the shaft.  It may be easy to get our feelings hurt because the new born often takes time (one statistic says up to 4 weeks) to recognize and seek out the voice of the father.  This is an excellent opportunity to start conditioning the baby to recognize your voice now.

For music lovers, this is also the opportunity to condition your baby to the music that you love.  It’s a known fact that many types of music stimulate very exaggerated response from fetuses.  Many mothers who have attended live classical concerts have reported that they have had to leave early due to their baby’s kicking – and some have reported in utero movement (kicking) in time with the music.  For audiophiles like myself and my wife, we plan to take this opportunity to see if the baby has a similar response to some of our favorite musicians.  At the very least, a preconditioning of this sort may allow for us to put on some of our favorite music and enjoy it while having a dual effect of calming the baby.   I’m in the midst now of creating a mix on the iPod of some classic Jimmy Buffet (the less up-beat songs), John Prine, Todd Snider, Hayes Carll, Jerry Jeff Walker, Marc Cohn, James Taylor, Jimmy Hendrix, Ella Fitgerald, and other eclectic mashups of artists.  I’ll report back with whether the baby responds to one artist or type of music over another.

BebeSounds Prenatal Heart Listener and microphone set runs about $40 at your local Babies’R'Us.  BRU (that’s text-speak for Babies’R'Us) rates the product 2 out of 5 stars – maybe because it takes until the third trimester on average for parents to actually hear the heartbeat.  Nonetheless, we like the product aso far nd I’d go with 3 or 4 out of 5 stars for the product, for the bonding-with-wife factor alone.  Enjoy!

BebeSounds Heart Listener