When my parents were young, there was lead-based paint everywhere. They were allowed to play with mercury in school. My dad has told me about how he and his friends used to ride their bikes behind the smoggers that sprayed pesticides in rural residential areas.
When I was a small child, the playground equipment at our school was mostly metal bars embedded in concrete. My brother and I had toys that would never be given to small children today, like Little People before they were the size of grapefruits or Polly Pocket when the entire toy actually fit in a pocket.
Recently, since most of my friends are getting married and/or having kids, I was looking at patterns to knit baby sweaters. Pullovers are out of the question: despite what people might think, babies actually have enormous heads. A baby's head will not go through the neck opening of a pullover unless it's a cowl neck or something. Of the fifty or so patterns I looked at, about half of them had buttons for closures.
This has to fall into the category of, "How on earth?" Baby clothes can't have buttons unless they're about four inches around: that child will choke to death in the amount of time it takes the mother to blow her nose.
I find myself muttering under my breath at all of my knitting books and magazines, thinking about whether or not I could easily modify the pattern to have a zipper.
