In case you hadn’t heard, there was an itty bitty conference in Chicago over the weekend, and Navy Pier was overrun with estrogen and vaginas. Since the Windy City is the home of IP headquarters, we thought we would try to latch on to the fun and reap the benefit of seeing great writers and friends while skipping sitting through the Feed Your Family Writing About Your Cat seminar.
We started with a pre-festivities gathering on Thursday night, hoping to lure our columnists and a handful of others into our trap with the offer of free alcohol. And it worked! (If you were not invited don’t be insulted, it’s us not you. OK, maybe a little bit you.)
For entertainment, we had Helen from Electronic Arts showing off the new Wii dance/karaoke game Boogie. Why, you ask? Because not only did it sound like fun, but I’m a cheap bastard and she offered to provide the booze. And how did I show my gratitude? By messing with the complicated A/V setup at our party space, managing to knock out the side panel of the entertainment center where it proceeded to fall on all 82 pounds of Helen leaving a nice gash in her forearm. A little word of wisdom to all you wannabe big time internet publishers out there:
DO NOT MAIM YOUR CORPORATE SPONSOR.
Fortunately that was the only injury of the night, besides the damage done to the buffet and liquor cabinet.
The World Health Organization recommends you nurse a toddler until 2 years old, basing that off of available resources of third world countries. In countries where adequate nutrition is accessible, is this necessary or could it even be harmful if based strictly on societal taboos? Should our society be more open to the potential nurturing advantages of extending breastfeeding?
Food for thought…
If a child in a third world country remembers drinking milk from his/her mother’s breast, surely that memory would be one of thankfulness for the meeting of needs such as nourishment and possible survival. If a child from a developed country remembers drinking from a mother’s breast, can or will he/she feel the same way?
In some cases, there are mothers who continue to nurse children who have turned 4 or even 5 years old, which is old enough to enter kindergarten, believing their children will reap nutritional benefits.
“The idea of breast-feeding a child until they’re a preschooler is still fairly restricted to a small group of women, or at least, it’s kept in the closet,” said ABC News parenting contributor Ann Pleshette Murphy.
The practice of extended nursing has sparked heated controversy because some disagree about when it is no longer appropriate to breast-feed children.
Some critics say breast-feeding too long could potentially stunt child development. Read the rest…
North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper’s office said in a statement that based on MySpace’s own estimates, the number of registered sex offenders with MySpace pages under their own names was four times more than the company’s previous estimate.
Cooper is proposing that North Carolina pass legislation to ban registered sex offenders from using social networking sites that allow minors, and strengthening other anti-child pornography and criminal penalties for Internet solicitation of minors and children for sex. The proposal also suggests that social networking sites’ underage users be required to get parental permission before registering and posting personal information.
Young people have been the early adopters and most avid users of social networking sites, making them targets for sexual predators.
And this only includes the geniuses that used their real names, who knows what the real count is. If you only have a vague awareness of what your kid is doing on sites like MySpace, you need to get more involved — they have the ability to post tons of personal information such as hometown, age, school, as well as uploading personal photos. And unless they have their accounts set to private, any registered MySpace user can view their profiles.
This concludes The Imperfect Parent’s “Give You More Things to Worry About” moment of the week.
Please pardon this momentary indulgence of self-promotion, which I normally keep to a minimum, but I’m too excited about this one.
The Imperfect Parent’s sex goddess Mominatrix has agreed to tear herself away from her new boyfriend, Hoover, and take to the airwaves. Mominatrix Radio, hosted by Kristen Chase along with yours truly as her subservient lapdog, will feature plenty of chat about sex, sex, and um, sex, from a parent’s perspective.
For the first show, Mominatrix will be broadcasting LIVE from BlogHer 2007, where we’ll be talking about “trying to conceive” sex — did you find romance between the Clomid and basal thermometers, or was it all business? We want to hear your stories. Mine involves the most embarrassing moment of my life as I walked into a fertility clinic full of 30 women and… well, if you want to know what happened you’ll have to tune in next Friday, July 27, at 7 p.m. CST.
Win a Mominatrix t-shirt! And we’re not talking about a crappy dollar store shirt either, but rather an embroidered shirt by Fadiddle on quality Alternative Apparel. It’s easy to enter — just add a Mominatrix Radio button to your blog by copying/pasting the below code anywhere in your blog template:
I was reading the story about how the new Harry Potter book has been leaked on the internet (no, not the previously reported hacker story, this one appears to be legit), and the accompanying images caught my eye. Apparently the Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows covers are vastly different between the version sold in the U.S. and the one sold in the U.K.
Here’s the U.S. version of the cover:
And here’s the British version:
The second one looks like a Grisham novel for chrissakes. Why the two versions? I have my theories:
a) Brits want to be more subtle about the fact that they are sitting on the train reading a children’s book
b) American kids will only read something with a cartoon on the cover
c) It entices suckers, er, collectors to buy the book twice
d) J. K. Rowling demanded a more subdued version that didn’t clash with her solid gold jewel-encrusted castle
e) They just felt like it
I’m sure the answer could be easily found out with a bit of research, but why would I do that? Wild accusations and assumptions are so much more fun.
Today marks a major blow to the many parents claiming that vaccinations, namely the MMR, is linked to autism, once again confirming that you can’t base truth on lack of evidence.
One of the most outspoken opponents to the MMR, and of which his expert claims gave many parents cause for concern, is facing many accounts of professional misconduct. So many, in fact, that I’ll decline to list them all here.
I think parents who insist on a linkage between vaccines and autism without hard evidence need to take a moment of reflection and ask themselves, why is it so important to blame someone and why do those accusations happen to fall upon a multi-billion dollar industry? In other words, you can’t sue oxygen, cultural patterns or genetics, can you?
The doctor who sparked the MMR controversy paid children £5 to take their blood samples at his son’s birthday party, a disciplinary panel heard today.
Dr Andrew Wakefield is accused of showing “callous disregard for the distress and pain” he knew or ought to have known the children might suffer as a result of his actions.
He is also accused of abusing his position of trust and bringing the medical profession into disrepute.
The article goes on to say:
One of the charges he faces is failing to disclose he was paid by solicitors to do separate research for parents who said their children were harmed by the jab.
It is also alleged that he broke the hospital’s ethical rules by subjecting the children to unnecessary medical examinations and “abused his position of trust” by taking blood samples from children at a birthday party. Read the rest…
A list of MMR and Autsim evidence and Dr. Wakefields interests in chronological order:
March 1998
A panel of experts convened by the Medical Research Council on Government orders says there is “no evidence” of a link between the MMR jab and bowel disease or autism.
A total of 37 researchers reviewed the available evidence and said there was no reason to change the current MMR vaccination policy. The panel comprised experts in virology, epidemiology, gastroenterology, immunology, paediatrics, autism, and child psychiatry.
April 1998
A long-term study from Finland, published in The Lancet, finds no evidence of autism being associated with MMR.
Of three million children given the combined jab, 31 youngsters were found to have developed gastrointestinal symptoms such as diarrhoea and vomiting within 15 days of the injection. But their symptoms generally lasted no more than a week.
None of the 31 children developed any signs of autism or any similar condition, the researchers said. Read the rest…
It’s obvious that we firmly believe here that you don’t have to be a perfect person to be a decent parent (and if it’s not obvious, uh, scroll up to the masthead), but my god, sometimes I think that if you have the mental capacity of what’s in the dirty diaper of the child in your care, maybe some intervention might be necessary. Such is the case with Ebony Thorne, but unfortunately that intervention came too late. Ms. Thorne decided that the best way to treat her 2-year-old son Joshua’s head injury that he sustained from a fall down the stairs was to put a Popsicle on it and put the child to bed. As you can imagine, this did not have a happy ending:
When the boy’s father arrived later, he found Joshua unresponsive. Police say he called Thorne’s mother, who drove to the apartment from Fort Worth and called 9-1-1. Officers found bruises and marks around the toddler’s head and dried blood on his nose and mouth.
Thorne’s charged with injury to a child by omission/criminal negligence. Her 3-year-old son and ten-month-old girl were returned to their grandmother, who had custody of all three children.
My youngest took a spill at the playground a couple weeks ago and nearly bit through his lower lip. And when I saw my 4-year-old with a mouth full of blood I freaked out. The whole time I was taking care of his injury I was fraught with worry and guilt, second guessing if I was treating it properly — should we go to the doctor? Does he need stitches? Any teeth loose? Fortunately once I cleaned him up the bleeding stopped soon after and the worst outcome was a fat lip. And we STILL babied him for the rest of the day, and gave him ice cream for dinner.
So when I read that a mother of three was so nonchalant about her toddler falling down the stairs (not to mention the obviously complete ignorance about concussions), I just don’t get it.
New survey results from the Pew Research Center look at trends over the last decade and they’ve concluded that most mothers who work full-time outside their home really don’t want to:
Among working mothers with minor children (ages 17 and under), just one-in-five (21%) say full-time work is the ideal situation for them, down from the 32% who said this back in 1997, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. Fully six-in-ten (up from 48% in 1997) of today’s working mothers say part-time work would be their ideal, and another one-in-five (19%) say she would prefer not working at all outside the home.
I’ve already heard the host on a conservative talk show this morning trying to spin these results as a “return to family values,” and asking what happened to all the feminists that talked of “empowerment for the working woman”. That the survey shows that most women want to be in the “traditional” role of homemaker and ditch the male-dominated rat race.
What bullshit. Let’s base this in a little more solid Occam’s Razor reality, shall we? How many of you out there that work full-time — no matter what your gender — do it by choice? Being able to do something you love and get paid for it is a rare thing, and there are only so many openings for exciting jobs like rock star, firefighter, or insurance agent. I think it’s safe to say that most moms and dads would leave behind the world of stolen staplers and TPS reports if given the opportunity.
There comes a time in our children’s lives when they travel beyond the song stylings of Barney and Ralph’s World and into the uncharted waters of teeny-bopper pop music. For my youngest, that time came early when at the ripe age of 2 he developed an obsession with Kelly Clarkson. Lately he’s transferred his affection to someone more age appropriate in the form of Miley Cyrus (a.k.a, Hannah Montana, a.k.a. Achy-Breaky Jr.). Combine that love with an XM Radio subscription, and it’s all Radio Disney, all the time around here.
Usually I tune it out as it’s mostly crap (sorry, Jonas Brothers, you’re cute kids and all, I’m sure the tween girls love you, and I know one of you has diabetes, but you’re the modern day Hanson. And no, that’s not a good thing). But the other day driving along with the kids, I inexplicably found my hands tapping the steering wheel. The chorus was incredibly catchy, and if I were not going 60 miles an hour there might have been an impromptu booty shaking session. The song turned out to be Aly & AJ’s latest single, “Potential Breakup Song”, and at the risk of ruining my hipster cred, I’m going to admit that I actually like it — a lot. It’s got a Shakira/Ricky Martin groove with a splash of ABBA thrown in the middle, a nice guitar riff during the bridge, refreshingly non-corny lyrics, and a video that looks like a cell phone commercial. It is one finely crafted pop song.
Sure, sure, in Blender magazine Aly advocates prayer in school and AJ was quoted saying, “Evolution is silly. Monkeys? Um, no.” But so what? While they may not be deep thinkers, they can pen a decent tune — and in this society, that usually gets you farther in life.
So what about you? Any guilty pleasures lurking in your kids’ listening collection?
Ah, the cell phone, the great diversion for fussy babies and cranky toddlers the world over. What parent hasn’t handed their tot the cell phone so they could do their grocery shopping or order a non-fat latte in peace? Heck, we even have made it habit of giving our old phones to the kids when we upgrade — there must be at least two or three Motorolas at the bottom of the toy box. Apparently that’s not such a hot idea — by law, the FCC requires that even deactivated phones still be able to reach 911 emergency services. Did you know that? I sure didn’t.
A 4-year-old in the Chicago suburbs found that out through trial and error, and was so delighted to have someone pick up on the other end that she called back — 287 times. The police were finally able to get the girl’s location when on the last call she indicated she was having a Big Mac Attack and they convinced her to give her address so they could deliver it. But instead of a Happy Meal the folks in blue brought a stern lecture for Mom.
I was really hoping they would have reported what kind of phone it was so I could go get one — the battery must have a hell of a long talk time.
"Try as hard as we may for perfection, the net result of our labors is an amazing variety of imperfectness. We are surprised at our own versatility in being able to fail in so many different ways." -- Samuel McChord Crothers
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Posted
July 29, 2007 at
7:42 pm by
Prescott 
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July 29, 2007 at
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