Anne, Anne, Are You Okay?

Ever since Bean was born, I've done what any good mother would do: I've become increasingly paranoid that my child will choke on anything larger than 1/16 of a sunflower seed, and I've become increasingly convinced that he should probably just eat rice cereal for the rest of his life so we can avoid living the horror stories parents seem to love to tell about the time their kid almost died eating a Gummi bear.

The other thing I did was brush up on my CPR skills. The infant dummy is strange and slightly scary--you have to blow up its body!--but most of us have distinct memories of Anne, the gold standard of resuscitation dummies.

For the curious, Anne was a real person and a probable suicide. I'm not sure what you could do with this information--be nice the next time you give her mouth-to-mouth, I guess? But still, it's interesting, the faces we use and for what. Now to track down that ever-elusive Gerber baby . . .

Photo: Anne

Update: The Gerber baby has been found! (Actually, she wasn't very hard to track down. And she is not Humphrey Bogart.)