Pendragons Princess

I’m really surprised this has not yet happened to Michelle Duggar. Warning: Graphic material ahead:

http://www.sphere.com/2009/11/06/woman-reveals-health-horror-my-vagina-fell-out/

Woman’s Health Horror: ‘My Vagina Fell Out’

by Buck Wolf

November 6, 2009

Allison Henry isn’t the first to suffer from a horrifying medical condition that few women talk about. But her case was particularly bad, and she’s just one of the few brave souls willing to come forward so that others will have the courage to seek help.

To put it bluntly, as Henry does: “My vagina fell out of my body.”

The 39-year-old school psychologist from Kenmore, Wash., suffered from a rare combination of disorders that began when she was pregnant with her son, Kirian, and she writes an amazing account of her bizarre medical condition on MomLogic.com.

“I know it sounds like a science fiction movie,” she told Sphere.com. “Every time I retell this story, I still tell myself, ‘I can’t believe this happened to me.’”

It began five years ago, when Henry was in her 10th week of pregnancy with Kirian, her second child. She had vowed that she wouldn’t gain 60 pounds this time around, and she was practicing prenatal yoga in her home when she felt a sudden pain.

“It felt like someone rammed a pitchfork up my butt, so I stopped,” she writes. “It was an intense, sharp paint, but it passed.”

Later that day, while giving her daughter lunch, she ran to the bathroom, thinking she had to urinate, and found blood gushing instead. “It was the biggest scare of my life,” she writes.

Her OB/GYN couldn’t figure out what was wrong, and she kept bleeding. “I’d bleed through a maxi pad in 30 minutes,” she says.

In her 25th week, she was put on bed rest in the hospital, where she stayed for three weeks. When she finally went home, she started bleeding again and had to go back.

“My husband and I were so worried,” she says. “My son was born 6 1/2 weeks early. Thank God, he’s OK now.”

Doctors found that she had developed a hematoma outside her placenta, and they thought that was the root of her problem.

In fact, her problems were just beginning.

‘My Insides Were on the Outside’

“One day in the bathroom, I felt something kind of strange when I was wiping,” she writes. “There wasn’t really a hole there — it felt kind of flat. I thought it was a little weird, but I had a 19-month-old and a newborn to care for, so I brushed it off. I wasn’t bleeding, I wasn’t in pain, so I didn’t address it.”

What Henry was describing was the beginning of a vaginal prolapse, a condition in which the vagina, uterus, rectum, bladder, urethra and small intestine shift and — in severe cases — innards may protrude from the body.

“Women will suffer for years and not tell anyone,” says Dr. Suzanne Gilberg-Lenz, a gynecologist in Los Angeles. “They’d rather tell their doctor they have a sexually transmitted disease than say that something is hanging out of them.”

“Allison Henry clearly had an extraordinary, horrible case,” the doctor says. “But it’s widely estimated that 30 percent of women or more suffer some degree of prolapse in their lifetime.”

Instead of dealing with her health problem, Henry turned her attention to raising her children. She also had to have an appendectomy, which consumed much of her time over the next year.

Still, each time she went to the bathroom, she noticed her problem was getting worse.

“One night, I took a look down there, and it was like my insides were on the outside and they were coming out,” she writes. “I knew I couldn’t put this off any longer. I went to my doctor and said, ‘My vagina is falling out of my body!’

“I was referred to a pelvic floor specialist. She took a look and said, ‘Holy crap — your vagina is falling out of your body, and it’s dragging your bladder and your rectum along with it!’”

In addition to a uterine prolapse, Henry also suffered rectocele — a condition wherein the rectum pushes into the back walls of the vagina. “That explained why I had been constipated for months,” she says.

Henry also suffered from cystocele, a condition similar to rectocele, only with the bladder.

While the normal uterus is 8 to 11 centimeters inside the vagina, hers was only 3 centimeters up, and when she was standing, it was sticking out at least 5 centimeters.

After confronting the problem, Henry was able to undergo a series of surgeries to restore her vagina, untwist her bladder, and push her rectum back into place.

“On top of this, I had a labia reduction, which was brutal,” she writes. “All of ‘Dr. 90210’s’ patients who say it doesn’t hurt are lying. I’d rather get my teeth pulled out than do that again!”

Stable Mable Regains Her Humor

Her road to recovery has not been easy. At one point, she lost 30 pounds and had to return to the hospital several times to deal with complications.

“I had always been a healthy person, nothing so much as a yuckie pimple when I was growing up,” she says. “And then, I was incapacitated for several weeks, many times.

“Among my friends, I was always the stable Mable,” she says. “‘I eventually started taking anti-depressants to cope with the chronic stress and I became so emotionally depleted.”

Henry credits her husband for pulling her through. “He is the kind of man who doesn’t need to be asked to do something,” she says. “He just does it. It helps a lot that he was working at home most of the time this was going on.”

It’s now a year and a half since her last stay in the hospital, and Henry came forward to tell her story because she wants women to seek help if they have to face what she has gone through.

Uterine prolapse is most common in women following menopause, childbirth or a hysterectomy, according to eMedicineHealth.com.

“Once I got past being mortified, I tried to keep my sense of humor. I can laugh about a lot of this now,” she says. “But I also know what it means to not have your health.”

…………………………………………………………..

For many women, this is freaky, not just scary. Whoever heard of body parts “designed” to fall out of the body? But the pro-natalist crowd keeps screeching that a woman’s body was designed just for having babies (maybe for some women, but the rest of us think it’s not so normal). I can imagine Allison’s shock when she saw her vagina falling out and hanging onto the floor like that. I’d go into shock too. The good news is, I am not at risk for anything falling out down there (my body was not designed for that purpose). No doubt there are plenty of jokes to be made about such an incident once a woman can get past the surgery and getting everything sewn up tightly down there. The big question is, how is this this has never happened to Michelle Duggar? Oh yeah - she is almost never in an upright position to allow gravity pull hers out; she’s always laying on her back.

This happened to me today while at the library in the late afternoon. Everything was peaceful until all of a sudden, a baby started crying and gurgling. I hear a young woman’s voice shushing it. This was a fairly new baby, too, only a few months old, and the next thing I hear while I am reading a book on how women become a success in the workplace, is that she is talking to it like it is a ten year old child: “I can’t take you anywhere! Quiet!” and “This is a library! Be quiet!” As if a several month old baby knows what a library is! I peeked out from the carrel I was sitting at and saw the mother. Not so surprisingly, she looked like a fifteen year old girl who should be in school, not at the library with her baby. Bleach blond hair, skinny, with a baby in her stroller. Classy. To top that off, I heard the mother using the f-word at her child. Nice. Not only are we into the white trash and using bad language at the library, but at the kid too? I got fed up and went to the reference desk nearby and asked the librarian if anything could be done about the woman. Such as, having her please leave the building and taking her child home with her. By that time I had to get home so I was not around to see this fifteen year old in appearance have to leave with her child. But really, this was a breeder extraordinaire. Since brain cells are not required to reproduce, and this one did not look like she graduated high school, I can only conclude that the kid will have to put up with a very stupid parent in the years to come. It’s sickening to think that these young girls, so desperate to have a child of their own, wind up being  a major parenting fail in public. But since they don’t have a clue how to care for and raise the child - they only know how to breed them - they’re going to have to be expected to be looked down upon like that.

This appeared in Details:

http://www.details.com/sex-relationships/marriage-and-kids/200610/did-your-girlfriend

-trick-you-into-fatherhood

That Was No “Accident”

You two were careful, but somehow she got pregnant. It happens. Or not… Getting tricked into fatherhood by a woman hell-bent on getting pregnant is much more common than you think.

By Ian Daly,
Photograph by Jenny Van Sommers

Imagine for a moment this perfectly plausible scenario: You’ve had a steady girlfriend for a year or so and everything’s going great. You still hold hands at the movies. Friends tell you you’re good together. You’re both around 30 years old and making plenty of money, maybe living together, but you’re nowhere near considering fatherhood. And though you occasionally get the feeling that her biological clock is set far ahead of yours, she tells you she’s “safe,” so you don’t worry. Why would you? It’s not as if you’d just picked her up on Dollar Margarita Night at Senor Frog’s. But one morning she tells you something has gone wrong. Unlikely as it sounds, she’s pregnant-and she wants to keep it. What she doesn’t tell you, though, is this: She wasn’t being safe all along. She wanted to have that baby— and the way she saw it, this was the only way to make it happen.

Here’s how a scenario like that played out in real life. Jody (not her real name), a 32-year-old account manager for a major New York ad firm, decided to speed things along with her boyfriend two years ago by getting pregnant without telling him. “It’s not about trapping the guy,” Jody says. “That’s kind of old-fashioned. Yeah, you want him to be into it, but there are other ways to get a guy to commit. If you’re smart and in a good relationship, it’s just about the fact that you want a kid.” Even in her circle of young, urban, and gainfully employed friends, Jody says, this particular brand of subterfuge isn’t exactly condemned the way one might expect. In fact, it’s sort of, well, normal. “I see and hear people talk about it, and I understand. I get it,” she says, “and I don’t even think it’s that manipulative. It’s more like, ‘Hey, the timing is right for me. I got pregnant—oops! Well, it’s here, let’s have it.’ I think that’s more the way it is now than it was back in the day when you had to marry someone before you got pregnant. Marriage doesn’t matter now.”

Railroading a guy into parenthood isn’t just some “baby daddy” soap-opera scenario. You’ll never hear the ladies’-room chatter that leads people like Jody to feel justified, but to get some idea of it, consider this: A woman’s fertility peaks when she’s between the ages of 20 and 24, according to Mayo Clinic statistics. By the time she’s 35 to 39, it’s already wilted by 25 to 50 percent. And from there the options aren’t always so attractive: The average cost of in vitro fertilization in the United States is $100,000 per baby—and insurance generally won’t pay a cent. Combine that with the shifting social mores about single motherhood and having kids outside of marriage, and you’ve got a pretty good explanation for why some women, particularly ones in stable relationships, don’t see this as trickery at all—it’s more like a nudge.

“A lot of us feel like it’s not even really fair that men should get to vote, considering they could be 72 and, with a little Viagra, have another baby,” says Vicki Iovine, author of The Girlfriends’ Guide to Pregnancy. “For us women, it’s really a limited window. We know that boys who grow up to become men don’t necessarily want to be men. They like to be boys. And so women say, ‘You know what? He’s gonna just have to snap out of it—and my pregnancy will be the thing to do it.’” The end, says Iovine, sometimes justifies the means. “Any guy with a heart and soul, and preferably with a job, once he sees the baby on the sonogram or hears the heartbeat, will melt,” she says.

Just how many women act on that presumption is hard to say. According to FDA figures, one in a thousand of them should get pregnant over the course of a year if they’re using the Pill exactly as prescribed. But it is estimated that in reality 50 times that many get pregnant. There’s no way of knowing how much of that disparity can be explained away by “intentional” oversight, but that’s a big gap to chalk up to carelessness. And though there was a time when flushing the Pill down the toilet was fodder for Jerry Springer, the rules have changed. “I’ve been hearing a lot about this lately, and it’s coming into the educated and wealthy classes, too,” says Pepper Schwartz, a relationships expert for Perfectmatch.com and professor of sociology at the University of Washington in Seattle (she does not support the practice). “These women can afford to take care of the child.”

Many of them will probably have to. We don’t hear about the cases in which a guy suspects he’s been duped into fatherhood- but ultimately turns to mush in the soft glow of the sonogram monitor. But as cavalier as certain women are about the “nudge,” not all men react so favorably when the “good news” is delivered—especially if they find out they’ve been snowed. Jody’s boyfriend more or less freaked out. She terminated the pregnancy, then their relationship slowly dissolved. “It felt a little like the fun was taken out of everything,” she says. “He was shocked and scared.”

Last year, Matt Dubay, a 25-year-old computer programmer in Saginaw, Michigan, says he had the same reaction when his girlfriend, Lauren Wells, allegedly pulled something similar. Dubay claims she told him she was infertile and was using a contraceptive “as an extra layer of assurance and protection.” But when she got pregnant anyway and told Dubay she was keeping the baby, he said he wanted no part of it. Earlier this year, he argued in court that her alleged deception should exempt him from having to pay child support. His lawyer, Jeffrey Cojocar, reasoned that Michigan’s paternity law violated the Constitution’s equal-protection clause: If the situation were reversed and Dubay had gotten Wells pregnant after claiming he was sterile, he’d have no way of forcing her either to keep or to abort the child. The judge didn’t buy his argument, but it’s helped open a broadening national dialogue: Where do you draw the line between deadbeat dad and victim of deceit?

“This case has actually been more of a movement,” Cojocar says. “I probably got four or five hundred e-mails—many of them from females.” The women Cojocar says he was hearing from were angry because their significant others were supporting exes who they suspected had pulled a sneak pregnancy. Cojocar is appealing the case to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati. In the meantime, Dubay is paying $500 a month in child support.

The case has become a cause celebre for the National Center for Men (NCM), a men’s-rights advocacy group that counsels people like Dubay through its website, www.nationalcenterformen.org—so much so that the organization’s picking up the tab for his court costs. It’s even trademarked the case: “Roe vs. Wade . . . for Men.”

“Matt is asking for the reproductive choice he would have had if he were ‘Mattilda,’” the website says. The NCM doesn’t have much contact with men who acquiesce to their role as new fathers. The guys who come to the organization see their situations as deception in its purest form.

“A lot of these men feel like they have no control,” says Mel Feit, the NCM’s executive director. “The courts are ruthless in enforcing getting money and not asking questions. Judges aren’t allowing the fraud argument, either.”

The NCM actually offers the “Reproductive Rights Affidavit” (think of it as the sexual equivalent of a living will), which challenges “any court order that seeks to impose a parental obligation upon me against my will.” Unfortunately for Jeremy, a 35-year-old technical consultant and musician in New York, the affidavit doesn’t provide a legal cover for now. He thought he’d found himself a nice girl. He had just split with his longtime fiancee but explains that this new woman was saying all the right things—even when it came to practical matters. She was on the Pill. She was pro-choice. So she and Jeremy (who’s using a fake name) enjoyed a couple of months of unprotected intimacy.

Then things got weird. She mysteriously quit drinking. She disappeared for days at a time. She told him she was considering going off birth control, though she assured him she hadn’t yet. By July, Jeremy had had enough and broke things off. Then in August, he says, she told him she was pregnant and was keeping it. “She was pregnant all of May, all of June, and all of July,” Jeremy says. “I said, ‘Why didn’t you tell me about this sooner?’ She’s like, ‘I didn’t want you to influence my decision.’ Something that has potential impact on me for the rest of my life, she doesn’t want me influencing her decision!?”

More than a year and $6,500 in legal fees later, Jeremy has a 7-month-old boy he’s never met, a child-support case pending, and a judge who’s less than sympathetic toward his allegations of contraceptive deceit. Even his own attorney told him he’d better ditch that dream of becoming a full-time musician and focus on the computer gig that he’d hoped would only supplement his income: “She was like, ‘You know what? You gotta be a man. You’re gonna have to have a job 40 hours a week, and you need to support this child—this is your responsibility and your obligation.’ And I’m thinking to myself, like, ‘How is all of this my responsibility and my obligation when none of this was my choice?’”

………………………………………………………………………………

There you have it, in a nutshell: women who are so desperate to have a child will do anything to a guy to get him to “give her” a child. It sounds icky, it sounds gross, it sounds abusive (but look at how American women treat men with disdain and little better than “Do this for me, do that for me” servitude. I would have to think that any woman who truly loved and respected her boyfriend or husband would never oops him. Those are very few and far between, women who meet other baby rabid women who never cease to bother them about having children (Huh? Now why on earth would I want a child? A child does not have any practical use to me.) Oopsing is a major social disease and one that should be made undesirable at all costs. Wait a minute: the consequences of oopsing are already undesirable: sleepless nights, a fire engine going off every two seconds in your ear, dirty diapers to change every half hour. Well, that would explain the miserable expressions on these young women’s faces as they take their infant to the mall in a stroller. Children do not buy happiness after all.

This is a great article:

http://lifestyle.msn.com/your-life/bigger-picture/articlemc.aspx?cp-documentid=22037279

&gt1=32001

To Breed or Not to Breed?

By Abigail Pesta

Yes, we live in a baby-obsessed nation. When do the tabloids not run craptastic cover stories on Octomom, Kate Gosselin, or Brangelina’s brood? Then there’s the tsunami of celeb-mom photos — Kate Hudson, Halle Berry, Gwen Stefani, toting their stylish tots like the latest It bag. It’s enough to make a childless woman feel like an alien. “There’s a stigma, especially if women are childless by choice instead of by circumstance,” says Laura S. Scott, the 47-year-old married and kid-free author of the new book Two Is Enough. “Childlessness is perceived as being selfish, with a tragic outcome — you’ll die alone with 10 cats.” But sometimes having babies isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. We asked Scott — who talked to experts, parents, and 171 childless folk for her book — to bust myths about parenthood.

ALL WOMEN HAVE THE MATERNAL INSTINCT. “We think we’ll get this burning urge,” Scott says. “But many women never feel a desire to have kids, ever.”

PARENTHOOD MAKES YOU A BETTER PERSON. “Better than who? Oprah? Gandhi?”

PARENTING IS, BY DEFINITION, REWARDING. For many, yes. For all? No. Says Scott, “Dr. Phil surveyed 20,000 parents, and a third of them said that if they knew then what they know now, they probably wouldn’t have started a family.”

IT’S DIFFERENT WHEN THEY’RE YOURS. “If you don’t like being around kids, you’re unlikely to be more tolerant if they’re yours — especially when they throw a fit at Walmart.”

PARENTING IS THE PATH TO MATURITY. “Our parents were raised to think this, and society clings to the notion,” says Scott. “But let’s face it: Having kids doesn’t guarantee mature behavior.” Ever see a dad go berserk on a Little League ref?

A BABY WILL STRENGTHEN THE MARRIAGE. “Research shows that marital satisfaction goes way down — particularly for women — after the birth of the first child,” she says. “It doesn’t return to honeymoon levels till the kids leave home.”

YOU’LL REGRET NOT HAVING KIDS. “Studies don’t show any widespread regret among the childless by choice. A lot of thought goes into the decision,” says Scott. And if you need a kid fix, you can always be a mentor.

KIDS OFFER SECURITY WHEN YOU’RE OLD. “Grown children are often hundreds of miles away,” Scott notes. “To really guarantee your well-being, long-term health insurance is a better bet.”

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We really do live in a baby-and pregnancy- centered society. For proof, I went to the the mall a few days ago and right by the entrance, I see a young Asian woman and as soon as she sees me, she starts to rub her very pregnant belly. Uh huh, like I was at all interested in that. Oh, she got the attention from me, but not the good type of attention. But back to the article: our society is in love with babies and small children (so are pedophiles, but that’s for another post) and once the reality of having a child hits the woman square in the face when she has to get up at 2:00 AM for a feeding, she is not going to singing and dancing while feeding a hungry baby. She will be yelling at the kid, “Why did you wake me up at this hour?!” I love the response to “parenting is a path to maturity”, to which can also be added, the parents fight like two five year olds over how to raise the child. Maturity, my ass. All a child proves is that their privates are in working order - and that most certainly is not love.

But so much for unconditional love. Speaking of unconditional love, my hubby and I are celebrating our childfreeness tonight with chicken stir fry and a peaceful, quiet evening loving each other - one thing childed people never have time for when a child is involved.

Nothing shocks me anymore:

5 Charged With Setting Teen on Fire

October 14, 2009

DEERFIELD BEACH, Fla. (Oct. 14) — Five teenagers were charged with aggravated battery Tuesday for dousing a 15-year-old with rubbing alcohol and setting him on fire after a dispute over money owed and an attempted bicycle theft, authorities said.

Michael Brewer was hospitalized with burns on more than three-quarters of his body after the attack at a Deerfield Beach, Fla., apartment complex Monday.

The Broward County Sheriff’s Office said in a news release that 15-year-olds Matthew Bent, Denver Jarvis, Steven Shelton and Jesus Mendez and 13-year-old Jeremy Jarvis were charged with aggravated battery. Mendez was also charged with attempted second-degree murder because authorities say he flicked the lighter.

The victim’s brother-in-law, Danny Martinez, told the South Florida Sun Sentinel that Brewer is in serious condition but doing OK.

He was burned on his torso and arms, sheriff’s spokesman Jim Leljedal said. Family members said most of his hair, including his eyelashes, had also been burned off.

“In my 31 years, you always say, ‘It’s the most heinous crime I’ve seen,’” Broward County Sheriff Al Lamberti told the Miami Herald. “In this case, this one fits in that category.”

Police say Brewer had borrowed $40 from Bent to buy a video game but never paid him back. When Bent tried to steal a bike belong to Brewer’s father, Brewer called police.

Brewer refused to attend classes at Deerfield Beach Middle School on Monday because of the bicycle incident Sunday, authorities said.

Instead of going to school, Brewer went to the apartment complex to visit a friend. He told deputies that while he was sitting by the swimming pool, he was splashed with a flammable liquid and set ablaze.

A neighbor heard his screams for help and put out the flames with a fire extinguisher, said Malissa Durkee, Brewer’s sister. The teen then ripped off his shirt and jumped into the pool.

Brewer is expected to remain hospitalized for five months, Martinez said.

Bent and the Jarvis brothers were in court Tuesday and were ordered held in a juvenile detention center for 21 days. The Fort Lauderdale Sun Sentinel reported that attorney Stephen Melnick said Jeremy Jarvis was “just there. He was not accused of actually doing it.” Attorneys for the other two said they were “minimally involved.”

The five were not charged as adults, but Leljedal said the sheriff’s office typically releases the names of anyone charged with a felony, regardless of age.

The Sun Sentinel said that all five boys had prior criminal records.
………………………………………………………………………………

All five boys had prior criminal records. It bears repeating here given the nature of this heinous crime. Now I said that nothing shocks me anymore when it comes to snowflakes, and I meant it. Now we have the #1 question at the helm here: “WHERE were the parents at the time of this crime?” No, I am not talking about the parents of the unfortunate boy, I am talking about the parents of the five criminals, if they even exist. On the surface the story sounds like another case of white trash committing a heinous crime - the authorities were good enough to release the names of these criminals. These criminals are not the precious, Christ-image deities their “parents” worship - or are they? More like the image of Satan. How cold and apathetic are the expressions on their faces?:

That’s quite an image of two of the monsters, Jeremy and Denver Jarvis. Pure evil does exist, and hopefully they will be in jail for the rest of their lives with no chance for parole at all.

Children born with diabetes, that is. Read on:

http://www.lemondrop.com/2009/09/24/indonesian-woman-births-19-2-pound-jumbo-baby/1#c21850027

Sep 24th 2009 By Emerald Catron

Indonesian Woman Births 19.2-Pound Jumbo Baby

On Monday a woman in Indonesia broke her country’s record for fattest baby, popping out a whopper of a kid who weighed a little over 19 lbs. Sounds like double congratulations are in order … and some painkillers.

The woman, who had previously had three children with a traditional midwife in attendance, was escorted to the hospital when complications arose in her pregnancy, which was nine months along.

The doctors performed a Caesarian section and pulled out the 19.2-lb. baby boy. Doctors are saying the baby is healthy, although his crying is unusually loud, and his apparent love for food has traveled with him out of the womb. Binsar Sitanggang, one of the attending gynecologists, described it as “almost non-stop feeding.”

The baby is probably the size it is because his mother is diabetic, a condition which could have raised her glucose levels and thereby the baby’s, giving him more sugar than he needed and making him grow like a superhero fetus.

Although the largest surviving baby in the world weighed 3 lbs. more than this fellow, topping the scales at 22.44 pounds, let’s not kid ourselves: This baby is huuuuuge. How huge? Here are some other things that weigh approximately the same as Indonesia’s Jumbo Baby.

One of those ungodly gigantic sacks of potatoes that are so big you wonder who buys them.

A car tire. That’s right. An actual car tire.

If you had four 5-lb. bags of sugar, and your neighbor borrowed about 2 cups, the remainder would equal Gigantor Child.

Lemondrop editor Laura Gilbert’s tubby cat.

And this fish.
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Granted, the Indonesian woman who gave birth to this gargantuan infant probably did not have access to information on the dangers of having children if one is diabetic. So chances are very high that this baby is diabetic, too. What if this happened in the United States? A lot of people would be digging into the woman calling her uneducated, poor, a welfare queen, and other unsavory comments associated with women who just have lots of babies non-stop. The 19-pound baby is going to have a lot of health problems and not just from diabetes, either. Then there is the problem of the boy getting teased for being so big in school. But no, every woman has to have “just one more child.” Ugh.

Thom Christopher, the actor who played Hawk in the second season of “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century” and Carlo Hesser in “One Life to Live”, is childfree.

The October 1990 issue of Soap Opera Digest reports that Thom, and his wife Judith, are in fact childfree by choice. This is a rather pleasant surprise, since I have always liked the Hawk character, especially the way Thom looked in those spandex tights (great hind view!). In the interview by Donna Hoke, Thom admits that with his and his wife’s busy schedule as actors, they have next to no time for taking care of kids. They have plenty of nieces and nephews, though, who they can splurge on when the chance comes. Thom also admits the reason people have children is because they feel pressured by society to do so, and that having children is a tremendous responsibility. Of course, Thom has many other responsibilities, including charity work for AIDS and the Special Olympics. Anyone with sexy, smoldering eyes like Thom’s is OK in my book, and his being childfree makes him even better. Love ya, Hawk.

I actually laughed as I read this one:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1212583/
Family-horrified-getting-restaurant-describing-year-old-daughter-little-f–er.html

‘Thanks, you little f*****’: Family horrified after restaurant bill makes clear what waiters thought of Molly, two

By Daily Mail Reporter

11th September 2009

Most parents have experienced their young children getting restless when waiting for a meal in a restaurant.

But not many get the bill at the end of it with a message describing their offspring as a ‘little f*****’.

This is what happened to parents Craig and Kimberley Cartin at a Mexican restaurant in Halifax, West Yorkshire, where they received the receipt which had ‘Thank you little f*****’ written on it.

Visiting the brand new eaterie, called Cactus Joe’s, on its opening weekend the family had already been frustrated by slow service and poor food, which caused hungry two-year-old Molly to complain.

‘Unbelievably offensive’: The family’s receipt - the obscenity is the last item on the bill

The couple believe her mild protests triggered the shocking comment - despite being seated in the advertised ‘kids’ zone’.

Fuming Craig, a 34-year-old administrator, said: ‘I couldn’t believe my eyes.  The meal was indifferent anyway but to be abused on the bill is unbelievably offensive.

‘I consider myself a fairly easy-going guy but this was too much, it’s awful behaviour.

‘Molly was a bit grumbly, a bit moany, but her behaviour certainly wasn’t  terrible - so this was just uncalled for. Presumably they meant to delete it  before printing but it’s still no excuse.’

Kimberley, 25, who was also with one-year-old daughter Megan at the time, described how the family had to wait a long time for their meal and then the offensive bill.

She said: ‘It was really quiet when we were in there.

‘But somehow they still managed to take that long to serve us and after about 20 minutes, Molly started to get restless and a bit impatient.

‘She wanted to get up and walk around but we wouldn’t let her so she had a little tantrum.

‘When we asked for the bill there was another long wait so I went up to pay at  the counter and that is when I saw the swear word on the bill.

‘I couldn’t believe it. The woman looked really embarrassed and the manager  apologised but I could still see people whispering and sniggering.

‘It’s out of order.’

Restaurant owner Steve Ryan apologised for the message and said the member of  staff responsible, believed to be a 29-year-old manageress, had been sacked.

He said: ‘This was absolutely inexcusable and it won’t be tolerated. The person  involved has been sacked and I am planning on consulting my lawyers to see if I can take further action against her.

‘I have visited the customer involved and invited him to be our guest this weekend. We offer unreserved apologies.’

The incident rounds off a torrid first fortnight for the restaurant.

After opening on August 28 it had to close again just days later because the gas  supply was inadequate causing dozens of cancellations.

Kimberley said she and Craig turned down the restaurant’s offer to be their guest.
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I guess the kid’s section did not work out too well in this new restaurant. Or maybe the new management was so poor and sloppy, the manager came from the local trailer park, thus exacerbating the poor service. I have this image of the manager saying, “I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.” Then we have the parents of the 2-year old grommet who decided to turn into a fire engine while the family waited for their meal. Not so precious, according to the person who left the message on the bill for the couple. As usual, the parents had their own excuse as to why they could not control their child or quietly leave the restaurant with her. It’s just another sign of the massive parenting fails around the globe.

Who says you can’t predict pregnancies?

http://www.people.com/people/article/0,,20301647,00.html

Duggars Expecting Their 19th Child!

By Alicia Dennis

September 1, 2009

Make way for more Duggars!

Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar of Tonitown, Ark., who have 18 children and one grandchild on the way, are expecting a new addition to their household – baby No. 19 will arrive in the spring.

“We are so thrilled,” says Michelle, 42. “We just couldn’t believe it is happening.” Jim Bob, 44, agrees: “This never gets old. We are so grateful for each child. We are looking forward to our first grand baby and our 19th child.”

Oldest son Joshua, 21 and his wife Anna, 21, are expecting daughter Mackynzie Renée next month, so she will be older than her new aunt or uncle.

“I think it is going to be awesome, it is going to be great,” says Josh about the news that his parents are expecting. “We have been looking forward to the arrival of my little girl and to now get to celebrate for my parents, it’s a wonderful thing.”

Another Fun Pregnancy
The families often get to see one another and are looking forward to the babies’ births.

“I love all of this, it is so fun,” says Michelle. “Anna and I will have babies five months apart. My mother and my sister were pregnant at the same time and it was really wonderful. The kids were really close and still are. I have a nephew who grew up with me, we’re just three months apart.”

The Duggars live debt-free in a house they built themselves with their kids, whose names all begin with J: after Josh there are twins Jana and John-David, 19; Jill, 18; Jessa, 16; Jinger, 15; Joseph, 14; Josiah, 13; Joy-Anna, 11; twins Jedidiah and Jeremiah, 10; Jason, 9; James, 8; Justin, 6; Jackson, 5; Johanna, 3; Jennifer, 2, and Jordyn-Grace, 8 months. Their lives are featured on TLC’s 18 Kids and Counting, airing Tuesday nights.

Surprised This Time

Despite being pregnant 18 times before, Michelle says this pregnancy came as a shock, although her daughters wondered why she was eating more pickles than usual.

“I was wanting pickles and the older girls were saying, ‘Mom, you only crave these at the very beginning of being pregnant, You kept it from us before, now tell us. Are you?’” Michelle says. “And I kept telling them I wasn’t. I just wanted some pickles.”

But when she couldn’t lose weight on her diet, she became suspicious.

“I was in Weight Watchers with Jim Bob and I wasn’t losing any weight,” she says. “I couldn’t figure it out. I was doing what I should. And the baby, who was nursing, was fussy. I kept thinking, ‘This isn’t right. She isn’t teething, she doesn’t have an ear infection. I’m not cheating on my diet, I should be losing weight.’ Then, I put two and two together and wondered if I could possibly be pregnant.”

She took out one of two tests she had in the house and it was immediately positive.

Renewed Marriage Vows
“I told Jim Bob and he couldn’t keep it in, he was so excited,” she says. “The kids were outside playing on a water slide and he gathered them together and had to share the news. There was all this screaming and yelling.”

The Duggars recently renewed their wedding vows – they’ve been married 25 years and one month – and say that the ceremony was a wonderful way for their own children to understand the commitment of marriage.

“We got married when Michelle was 17 and I was 19,” Jim Bob says. “We were married in the hallway of a church because at the time they had no sanctuary. There were plastic chairs and crepe paper. So, when we renewed our vows, we did it in that same hallway and we splurged to make bows out of a plastic white table cloth this time, but we still had plastic chairs. I think it is important to have the kids see that commitment themselves.”

No Health Concerns
Michelle says that since she was 36 years old, her doctor has given her and Jim Bob pamphlets about prenatal testing since there is an increase of risk of health problems in babies with older mothers. But, she says they don’t worry about those risks and don’t take the tests.

“We know what could happen,” she says. “We read through the information. If the Lord chooses to give us challenges along the way, we know His grace will be there, so we don’t opt to do the testing.”

As far as her own health, her doctor told PEOPLE when her last child was born that Michelle’s health was excellent: “Some women are made to have babies, and Michelle is to the nth degree,” ob-gyn Amy Sarver told PEOPLE in December. “She is in terrific health without any strain on her uterus.”

Michelle says she’s just glad for every day that she gets to enjoy being with her kids, even as she endures a 19th round of morning sickness.

“I’m feeling nauseous right now,” she says. “And, I’m tired. I am happy for the feelings of morning sickness and I’m happy for every day I get to play with my kids. We don’t know what tomorrow holds and so I try to enjoy every moment.”

Another J-Name
Already, names are being discussed in the Duggar household: Jessa, 16, has printed up a list of J-names for boys and girls that have yet to be used by a Duggar, Michelle says.

“We’ll hopefully find out whether it’s a girl or a boy at 20 weeks,” says Jim Bob. (Michelle is almost at the 12-week mark now.) “That will narrow the list down some.”

And Jim Bob says he’d welcome a little assistance: “We’d love to hear from the readers at PEOPLE.com to come up with a special name for this child.”

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Guffaw. A special name for the child? How about anything that does not start with the letter J?

My husband just commented to me that although Michelle Duggar and I are the same age, she could pass for my great great great grandmother. Sadly, multiple pregnancies do age a body and everything else in the process. Okay, so maybe he was exaggerating. Michelle may feel nauseous, but not as much as the rest of America, even those who have more than five but under ten kids. This is sick, it is not normal, it is not natural, and it sure as hell is not a clown car. I wonder if Jim Bob feels like God yet? This guy can populate an entire planet with his creations. Well, Michelle and Jim Bob have proven to the world they propagate prolifically enough for the rest for the human race to stop breeding overnight. I’m still laughing at my husband’s comment, though. And then that “Jim Bob couldn’t keep it in” - he certainly couldn’t! Too funny. It’s good to be childfree and look decades younger than your real age.

The Picture You Can’t Stop Talking About: Meet “the Woman on p. 194″

Warning: Post-pregnancy nudity ahead.

http://shine.yahoo.com/channel/health/the-picture-you-cant-stop-talking

-about-meet-quot-the-woman-on-p-194-quot-504942/

It’s a photo that measures all of three by three inches in our September issue, but the letters about it started to flood my inbox literally the day Glamour hit newsstands. (As editor-in-chief, I pay attention to this stuff!) “I am gasping with delight…I love the woman on p 194!” said one…then another, and another, andanotherandanotherandanother. So…who is she? And what on earth is so special about her?

Here’s the deal: The picture wasn’t of a celebrity. It wasn’t of a supermodel. It was of a woman sitting in her underwear with a smile on her face and a belly that looks…wait for it…normal.

I’d loved this photo at first sight myself–we’d commissioned it for a story on feeling comfortable in your skin, and wanted a model who looked like she was. But even so, the letters blew me away: “the most amazing photograph I’ve ever seen in any women’s magazine,” wrote one reader in Pavo, Georgia. From another in Somerset, Massachusetts: “This beautiful woman has a real stomach and did I even see a few stretch marks? This is how my belly looks after giving birth to my two amazing kids! This photo made me want to shout from the rooftops.”

The emails were filled with such joy–joy at seeing a woman’s body with all the curves and quirks and rolls found in nature. (Raising a question: With all the six-packs out there, do you even know what a normal belly looks like anymore–other than the one you see in the mirror?)

Related: Can We Please Think of Another Word for Plus-Size?

So what’s the story behind the photo? “The woman on p. 194″ is actually 20-year-old model Lizzi Miller, and this is her second appearance in Glamour, shot by fashion photographer Walter Chin. A size 12-14 and avid softball player/belly dancer (”I like exercising when it’s fun”), Lizzi moved to New York City from San Jose three years ago to become a model (a “plus-size” one by modeling industry standards, though hello, at size 12 she’s actually “normal size”…but I digress).

“When I was young I really struggled with my body and how it looked because I didn’t understand why my friends were so effortlessly skinny,” Lizzi told me. “As I got older I realized that everyone’s body is different and not everyone is skinny naturally–me included! I learned to love my body for how it is, every curve of it. I used to be so self-conscious in a bikini because my stomach wasn’t perfectly defined. But everyone has different body shapes! And it’s not all about the physical! If you walk on the beach in your bikini with confidence and you feel sexy, people will see you that way too.”

As for the letters, Lizzi’s loving them. “When I read them I got teary-eyed!” she says. “I’ve been that girl, flipping through magazines trying to find just one person who looked a little bit like me. And when I didn’t find it I would start to think there’s something wrong with the way that I looked. When J. Lo and Beyoncé came out and were making curves sexy, I started to accept myself more. It’s funny, but just seeing them look and feel sexy enabled me to do the same.” Lizzi, now you’re doing the same for all of us–massive congrats on that.

We had some rollicking debates in this blog last week about “fattism” and the TV shows for plus-size women. So let’s start off this week with something we can all get behind: a toast to the woman on p. 194, and to the spectacular sexiness of owning who you are. Trust me, Glamour’s listening, and this only strengthens our commitment to celebrating all kinds of beauty.

Now tell me…what do you think of the picture? Can a photo make you feel better or worse about your own looks? And what kinds of images would you like to see more of in Glamour? –Cindi Leive

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It’s not the fact that she is naked with her bits covered up decently, but rather the fact she is parading her stomch as a post-trophy after having kids. Essentially, she is saying “Look at what I have!” although not directly referring to her prizes but the end result of her own body. She is going to have to work out very hard and even get a tummy tuck to get rid of that revolting loose skin. If that’s a turn off to me, chances are that will be a turn off to other men including her husband. It isn’t bad enough when these post-pregnant women parade their kids around, now they have to parade their naked sagging stomachs around. Ugh.