Is a hip and stylish digital watch an oxymoron?

Reader question:
Got any recommendations for an
affordable, hip and stylish digital watch?  I hope that's not a total
oxymoron.

With middle of the night feedings,
watching the clock during the day to remember when the baby needs to nap or
eat, and getting sloshed with water from washing my hands and my two year old's
hands about 75 times a day, I'm looking for a digital watch that can handle
getting splashed.  Sounds lame, but at 4 a.m. when I'm trying to recall
how many minutes the baby has been nursing, I can't even handle reading the hands
of a standard watch!

Thanks!

Answer:
While a
backlit digital watch is not my favorite
accessory (for those, click here), there are a lot of digital watches out there
that can be worn beyond the darkened room of your babe.  If you want to wear a digi for more than utilitarian purposes, a good rule of thumb is to embrace the inherent awkwardness and in fact enhance it by going with something chunky and larger-scale, thereby making it cool.  Digis only look truly lame when you're wearing a diminutive ladies' version, which generally have no sense of irony.  Check out these cute and styley options in
order of price, lowest to highest.

Nike Presto Cee – Brown Metallic ($24.95)
I was pleasantly
surprised to find that one of the cutest digital watches I found was also the
least expensive.  This lightweight, water
resistant watch doubles as a bangle bracelet and has a push-button Indiglo
backlight to boot.  The Presto comes in a
variety of colors (but you know how I love my
metallics) and three sizes (small, medium and large–definitely go with at least a medium).

Freestyle Watch – Black FS81227 ($55.00)
Sometimes you just need to embrace
your inner nerd and own it.  Work
it.  If that’s your vibe, check out the
eighties-flashback Freestyle watch.  It’s
water-resistant to 100 meters, has a lifetime warranty, night light, a stop
watch and two alarms, so you could set one for each kiddo or use one for
feeding and one for sleeping to get your babe on a schedule.  Please do not consider this a date night
watch unless you are visiting a video arcade, which, as I just wrote that, I
realized would be my husband’s “perfect date.”  Mars/Venus . . . (sigh).

Puma Unisex Heart Rate Monitor Watch ($99.00)
Try
this fashion-forward Puma watch to see how your resting heart rate plummets whilst you nurse.  Water-resistant to 50 meters, this watch also
sports a count-down timer, alarm, backlight, and a handy lap counter to keep
track of how many times you pace the hallway with your peanut each night.

Diesel DZ7071 Watch ($120.00)
I don’t know what Shana would have
to say about this, but I consider this Diesel digi worthy of a casual date
night, v-neck with boyfriend jeans at a bistro down the street and some jazz-after kind of thing (my "perfect date").  I love the Euro menswear feel, leather
strap and funky yellow crystal display. 
I can’t be sure, but it looks to me like there’s a stopwatch function,
so you could at least time your feedings or minutes to naptime, and you’ll be grateful
for the uber-modern built-in crystal guards should your two-year-old ever get a
hold of it.

Suunto Lumi in Terra ($239.00 on sale)
The Sunto Lumi pulls out
all the stops, both in style and function. 
You don't have to wear it with any sense of mom-fashion-trade-off irony because it's just a good, solid, funky watch suitable for casual wear by any standard.  The Terra color is a nice neutral but the black is super sleek–I used this snap because it shows the detail on the band better.  If you want to feel exceptionnellement continental and simultaneously exercise your brain out of its postpartum slump, set it to the 24 hour clock for kicks.  If you’re a hiker or trekker, you’ll love the altimeter and compass,
while all moms can appreciate the barometer and thermostat to help with
weather-appropriate babe-dressing each day. 
It also tracks sunrise and sunset in 400 locations worldwide, in case you want to
know when your kids would be sleeping in say, Nepal, alongside the more basic calendar,
stopwatch and alarm functions.

Well, here’s to sleeping
through the night sometime soon!

Best,
M.