Today NPR's All Things Considered introduced the adorable 12-year-old Caitlin Sanchez, the new voice of Dora the Explorer. If you have a three-year-old girl, then this is a major cultural passing of the torch, like a new James Bond, or a new singer for Van Halen. ¡Vamanos!

When you have a three-year-old in the house you quickly grow weary of the traditional nursery rhymes like The Itsy, Bitsy Spider. For relief, I've been introducing my daughter to music we both can enjoy together: The Beatles. Her fab four appreciation and knowledge are growing by leaps and bounds. She can already name all four Beatles, and is slowly learning who is singing on which songs. Her current favorite is Ringo (Yellow Submarine, Octopus's Garden), followed by Paul (Hello Goodbye, Her Majesty). I'd love to turn her on to I am the Walrus, but she's not quite ready yet. Maybe when she's four.

The Baby Book: Everything You Need to Know About Your Baby From Birth to Age Two bills itself as the "baby bible" of the post-Dr. Spock generation. The authors are William Sears, M.D., and his wife, Martha Sears, R.N. Their sons, Robert and James Sears, both doctors themselves, also contribute to the 2003 edition.

The Baby Book is organized into five parts: baby-care basics; feeding and nutrition; contemporary parenting; development and behavior; and health and safety. The book is comprehensive (over 750 pages long), well-written, and has the air of authority about it. William Sears is a Harvard-trained M.D., and his medical expertise shines through, especially in the chapters on nutrition and health and safety.

The "baby bible" reference is appropriate in more ways than one. Dr. Sears is the guru of the "attachment parenting" philosophy, which borders on religion to some advocates. Attachment parenting emphasizes early bonding, breastfeeding, "babywearing" (carrying your infant), and sleeping with (or at least very near) the baby. Although the book encourages attachment parenting, it is not overly dogmatic, and even those who are skeptical about this approach can still get a lot out of the book.

The chapter on babywearing encourages the use of a baby sling. We went ahead and bought the Nojo sling, recommended by Dr. Sears, but we all (mom, dad, and baby) ended up despising it. In fact, I have yet to meet a parent who likes those stupid slings. Instead, we ended up buying the Baby Bjorn on the enthusiastic recommendations of other new parents. The Bjorn, with its lumbar support, was a delight to wear, and baby loved it too. We were sad to give it up when Mina outgrew it.

In sum: read this thick, informative baby bible, but don't interpret it literally. And forget the stupid sling.

I finally slogged my way through Healthy Sleep Habits, Healthy Child by Dr. Marc Weissbluth. Weissbluth is a pediatrician with a background in sleep research. He stresses the vital role of good sleep in healthy development, often comparing children's need for sleep to their need for food (for example, he coins the phrase "junk sleep" in analogy to "junk food"). After convincing the reader to take sleep seriously (a valuable contribution in itself), he sets out some sensible advice for achieving healthy sleep. A notable feature of Dr. Weissbluth's approach is that he sees nothing wrong with letting a baby "cry it out" in order to learn self-soothing skills. This contrasts sharply with the views of Dr. William Sears, the "attachment parenting" advocate. (In fact, in the final chapter of Weissbluth's book he can't resist taking jabs at Dr. Sears' ill-informed sleep advice. Baby advice is apparently a nasty business.)

The ideas and research may be sound, but the book itself leaves much to be desired. The book begins on a gratuitous and superfluous note with a forward written by supermodel Cindy Crawford. By the end of Chapter 1, though, you're wishing that Cindy had written the whole book. Dr. Weissbluth may be an excellent pediatrician and sleep researcher, but he's a lousy writer. The prose is monotonous, repetitive, poorly organized, and sometimes frustratingly ambiguous. The reader is subjected to endless testimonials written by his former patients, describing how miserable their lives were until Dr. Weissbluth saved the day with his penetrating advice (inevitably, "put the baby to sleep earlier"). There are a dozen or so diagrams ("figures") in the book, each consisting of a baffling jumble of words and arrows. One such graph has a node inexplicably labeled (I swear I am not making this up) "infanticide". Ouch!