Pendragons Princess

Uh oh, Jack, now you’ve gone and done it: you have ticked off the majority of Child Worshipping Americans who think their child should be deified and worshipped by the rest of the planet. It’s about time a real parent with some common sense fianlly woke up:

http://www.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/03/03/cafferty.excerpt.2/index.html

Monday March 23, 2009

Excerpt: Parents, your kids aren’t that special

Below is an excerpt from CNN commentator Jack Cafferty’s new book, “Now or Never.” Jack appears daily in “The Situation Room” on CNN from 4 to 7 p.m. ET.

I never presumed to have any more answers about being a parent than anybody else.

There are no perfect parents, perfect kids, perfect families — only degrees of dysfunction.

You get up in the morning and do the best you can. At the end of the day you say, “Okay, that wasn’t so bad, let’s try it again tomorrow.” Some of my instincts were pretty good and some of them were awful.

I did stay engaged and didn’t say to hell with being a father when my first marriage ended. With the younger girls, I eventually made the choice to clean up my alcoholism before I pushed things to the point of no return. But most of the credit does to my second wife Carol; to the girls; and to God Almighty. Ultimately, I’ve just been very fortunate.

I don’t know the status of parenting in America. But I know a little about the status of education in America. Parents’ growing inability to impose manners and limits on their kids when the kids are in school is reflected in record dropout rates, as well as teen drug and alcohol abuse, teen sex, and unwed pregnancies. Maybe it’s parenting that’s on the decline, more than the schools.

Exhibit A: My wife and I have just been seated for dinner when the maitre d’ walks over and seats a young family at the table next to us and the kids start carrying on like orangutans on a leash.

The parents are going, “Timmy, that’s not nice, don’t throw your food, stop stuffing your mashed potatoes up your nose.” Are mom and dad having fun yet, picking food up off the floor, apologizing to people like us, and wiping food flung across the table off their faces?

Some parents still have this attitude that their kids are too special to be burdened by discipline. And the rest of us are supposed to put up with their little mutants. That attitude really pisses me off.

I hate to break it to them, but the kids aren’t special, and I don’t have to put up with their behavior. If you can’t control your obnoxious little brats, leave them home.

They don’t belong out in public annoying other people, period. I don’t remember a generation of kids ever so indulged and enabled to behave so badly. What’s going on?

I remember as a kid I was expected to behave myself out in public or suffer the wrath of one very angry father. And of all the things that used to piss him off, those expectations didn’t seem unreasonable. Something’s gone terribly wrong here. My guess is it has to do with the breakdown of authority, the collapse of strong family structure, and the abdication of parental responsibility, dictated in part by the necessity that both parents work.

Plus, we have a whole generation of Baby Boomers who are too busy feeling entitled to prolong their own self-indulgent, self-absorbed adolescences to rein in their own kids.

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It’s great to hear Cafferty say that it is not “all about the children” because it isn’t. Most adults - rational adults, anyways - when they do something, it for the benefit for the rest of adult human society. No, someone’s brat doesn’t deserve worship on any level; it’s lucky it’s getting it’s basic needs met, period. Entitlement has indeed ruined American society. When I was a kid too, parents had their own lives separate from the children. There was no catering to the whims of a child. In fact, my parents had no qualms about saying “No” about certain things. No child will ever die from being told the word “No.” There is more to come on this subject, however, so stay tuned.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102005062

In Quiverfull Movement, Birth Control Is Shunned
by Barbara Bradley Hagerty

March 25, 2009 · Among some conservative Christians, a movement is giving new meaning to the biblical mandate to “be fruitful and multiply.”

The movement, called Quiverfull, is based on Psalm 127, which says, “Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are sons born in one’s youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them.”

Those in the Quiverfull movement shun birth control, believing that God will give them the right number of children. It turns out, that’s a lot of kids.

‘We Actually Didn’t Want Children’

While cooking a typical predawn breakfast in the Swanson household in Shelby, Mich., 10-year-old Lydia Swanson cracks a dozen eggs laid by the family chickens. Her mother, Kelly, fries 3 pounds of sausage from the family’s own pig and toasts a 12-inch loaf of homemade bread.

If they didn’t raise their own food, Kelly Swanson says, they’d spend $1,000 a month on groceries for her gaggle of growing children, including 15-year-old Josiah and 13-year-old Elisha. But in listing their ages, Kelly gets Elisha’s age wrong.

“At least I remembered your name,” she says.

Kelly can perhaps be forgiven the lapse. The 40-year-old mom has seven children; the youngest is 6 months. And she’d like to have more.

The Swansons subscribe to the Quiverfull movement.

“When we first got married, we actually didn’t want children,” Kelly’s husband, Jeff Swanson, says.

But then the Swansons began to notice that the Bible was very high on big families. And Kelly says that she and Jeff decided that God knew how many children they could handle.

“We just started thinking, ‘God is sovereign over life and death. God opens and closes the womb,’ ” Kelly says. “That’s what his word says, so why we’re trying to fiddle around and controlling ourselves, we need to stop doing that.”

Eighteen years and seven children later, the Swansons live on Jeff’s dairy farm salary of less than $50,000 a year. And they’ve gotten used to the comments from outsiders, such as, “Do you know what causes this?”

“That’s always my favorite one when I’m pregnant,” Kelly says. “And my husband has a lovely response. Of course we know what causes it — we practice all the time.”
Their friends do, too. The average family at their evangelical church has 8.5 kids. They are children who the Swansons hope will spread the message of Christ.

‘Womb Is A Powerful Weapon’

That’s also the hope of Nancy Campbell, a leader of the Quiverfull movement and author of Be Fruitful and Multiply.

“The womb is such a powerful weapon; it’s a weapon against the enemy,” Campbell says.

Campbell has 35 grandchildren. She and her husband stopped at six kids, and it is her great regret.

“I think, help! Imagine if we had had more of these children!” Campbell says, adding, “My greatest impact is through my children. The more children I have, the more ability I have to impact the world for God.”

A Christian God, that is. Campbell says if believers don’t starting reproducing in large numbers, biblical Christianity will lose its voice.

“We look across the Islamic world and we see that they are outnumbering us in their family size, and they are in many places and many countries taking over those nations, without a jihad, just by multiplication,” Campbell says.

Still, Quiverfull is a small group, probably 10,000 fast-growing families, mainly in the Midwest and South. But they have large ambitions, says Kathryn Joyce, who has written about the movement in her book Quiverfull: Inside The Christian Patriarchy Movement.

“They speak about, ‘If everyone starts having eight children or 12 children, imagine in three generations what we’ll be able to do,’ ” Joyce says. ” ‘We’ll be able to take over both halls of Congress, we’ll be able to reclaim sinful cities like San Francisco for the faithful, and we’ll be able to wage very effective massive boycotts against companies that are going against God’s will.’ “

No Regrets

In a suburb of Grand Rapids, Mich., Misty and Seth Huckstead, both 31, are straightening up the living room for a birthday party. No small task with six kids and one on the way. With such a large family, they get by with one car. They shop at thrift stores and occasionally rely on the local seminary’s food bank.

Seth says it’s difficult having so many kids, but he and Misty have no regrets.

They didn’t always have this attitude, Seth says. When they were 23, already with four children, he had a vasectomy. But they searched the Bible and concluded that sterilization was an affront to God.

“He presents children as a blessing,” Seth says. “And so we started to evaluate whether our decision was ethically right. And we came to regret our decision.”

They turned to a ministry that raises money and finds doctors to reverse vasectomies at a bargain price. And their family grew. Misty says she’ll have as many children as possible. She loves having babies and believes it’s the proper role for women.

“It’s not individual, it’s not ‘I’m a woman, hear me roar, I’m going to go take on the world,’ ” Misty says. “Family has always been the foundation of church and society. It’s God’s design; it’s beautiful.”

Moments later, another Quiverfull family drops by, and for a few moments, they entertain themselves as would a large family 100 years ago.

They sing Psalm 127 — a song that seems written just for them.
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A few words to start off with: the core of Christian teaching is in the Gospels, not in Genesis 1:22 that says: And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas and let fowl multiply in the earth. Second, the only other scripture the Quiverfull movement likes to take out of context is Psalms 127. In whole, the chapter reads:

“Unless the Lord build the house, they labor in vain who build. Unless the Lord guard the city, in vain does the guard keep watch. It is vain for you to rise early and put off your rest at night, to eat bread earned by hard toil - all this God gives to his beloved in sleep. Children too are a gift from the Lord, the fruit of the womb, a reward. Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the children born in one’s youth. Blessed are they whose quivers are full. They will never be shamed contending with foes at the gate.” (NAB)

The last statement, “They will never be shamed contending with foes at the gate”, refers to adversaries to the family in times of litigation. During Old Testament times, legal courts were frequently positioned by the front gate to a city, and held in open spaces. Yeah it is very convenient for the Quiverfull movement to leave out the last part. But then, what reputed church does not take scripture oout of context to quote its own needs? Chapter 127 on the whole refers to the social structure of families in the Hebrew community.

Now, let’s see what Jesus has to say about the matter. Since family to Jesus means a family of the spirit and not one of the flesh, it is no surprise that many fundamentalists claim that his mother Mary had other children after His birth. For this purpose they like to quote the following:

“While he was still speaking to the crowds, his mother and brothers appeared outside, wishing to speak with him. But he said in reply to the one who told him, “Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?” And stretching out his hand toward his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers.”

Almost 100% of the time they love to leave off the last part of the text:

“For whoever does the will of my heavenly Father is my brother, and sister, and mother.” The entire scripture appears in Matthew 12:46-49. This of course is in reference to the spiritual family, not one that tells followers to have lots of babies.

There are plenty of places in the gospels where Jesus warns his followers not to think in the flesh, but in the spirit. Carnality has no place in early Christianity and consequently, a number of disciples became alienated from Jesus’ teaching because they could not begin to comprehend that there just might be a religion where the spirit takes precedence over the physical world. The Gospel of John Chapter 6 is just one difficult spot for the disciples.

Regarding Nancy Campbell, one can only imagine that Jesus would just shake his head if all he ever heard was “We must increase our numbers!” Maybe they forgot to read the part of the Bible where it says that only a handful of people will ever really be able to follow the path of Christianity (Matthew 7). Since Jesus never told his followers to “be fruitful and multiply” the entire time he was on earth, one can only wonder why a small segment of the population would call themselves Christain when they are not even making the basis of their beliefs on the Gospels. Instead, they take two quotes from the Old Testament completely out of context - the ones in Genesis, and Psalms. My guess is the founders of Quiverfull just wanted to find something in the Bible that might make legitimate plenty of running through the bedsheets to further their cause. After all, Joseph Smith believed that the Old Testament patriarchs and their practice of polygamy meant that it was okay for him, Brigham Young, and other early Mormon leaders to engage in the same practice, too. Again, Jesus never spoke about that issue except that marriage was between one man and one wife (Matthew chapter 19), not between one man and twenty plus wives. Back to Campbell for a moment, though: it is very clear that she had children just so she could program them into following her version of Christianity. This holds true of other Quiverfull families and ultimately, everyone who has grown up in a household who was programed to attend a certain church. The only problem with this, however, is the likelihood that these kids, once they grow up to be adults, could very well leave Quiverfull on their own volition. I guess breeding in numbers for religion is a sham after all. It happens to Roman Catholics, Protestants, even Muslims, only in their case they have to be silent about leaving the religion since Islam does threaten death to anyone who tries to leave the religion. Kathryn Joyce, like Campbell, admits to the political movement of Quiverfull with her statement:

“They speak about, ‘If everyone starts having eight children or 12 children, imagine in three generations what we’ll be able to do,’ ” Joyce says. ” ‘We’ll be able to take over both halls of Congress, we’ll be able to reclaim sinful cities like San Francisco for the faithful, and we’ll be able to wage very effective massive boycotts against companies that are going against God’s will.’ “

Ever since George W Bush left office, though, it is highly unlikely that Christianity in this form will take over the government: our Constitution prohibits any religion from being endorsed by the state on a federal level. Ultimately, some Quiverfull families will start to question the legitimacy of the movement. Seth Huckstead already has when he claims that it is “difficult having so many kids” and having to rely upon food banks. It makes one wonder how Americans get sucked into cults like Quiverfull. Educated folks won’t buy into a “family values” political movement (they only call it family values because they think they can recreate the Ozzie and Harriet tv show of 1955. The reality is, it’s making more followers for the movement who will wind up leaving the group later on.) without questioning the validity of the movement. In an Age of Whooppe, Quiverfull is just another whacky means for endorsing sex saturation in the name of religion, versus the name of Hollywood. Therefore, to a Quiverfull member, not all sex is created equal; it is only more equal to those who make babies for their so-called Christian movement. Quiverfull members would be much more honest if they could all admit that what they are doing is for purely political reasons and nothing else. It must be hard for people like that to even consider doing their own thinking - it’s better to have a particular self-appointed religious leader like Campbell and Joyce do their thinking for them. But it does give the cult’s members an excuse to have as much sex as possible without ultimately acknowleging the final consequences of their actions.

http://www.worldofceleb.com/Quotes/Babies/Babies2.html

I came across this yesterday and figured some of these are worth sharing:

“Except that right side up is best, there is not much to learn about holding a baby. There are one hundred and fifty-two distinctly different ways –and all are right! At least all will do.”
– Heywood Broun
1888-1939, American Journalist, Novelist

Yes, I have seen kids held all different, weird, and wacky ways when I worked at the local mall. Even upside down! But the kid doesn’t seem to mind it. With all of those constantly changing positions, it’s like riding on the Whirligig at the local amusement park.

“Infancy conforms to nobody: all conform to it, so that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults who prattle and play to it.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
1803-1882, American Poet, Essayist

This seems to be especially true of men. Watch a father in public with his kid. Really, he is trying to be a big buddy to the grommet.

“A loud noise at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.”
– Ronald Knox
1888-1957, British Scholar, Priest

LOL! Isn’t it interesting how there is a cover for that “other end” but not the first end? LOL!

“Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it.”
– Marshall Mcluhan
1911-1980, Canadian Communications Theorist

This is the best one yet. Awesome.

“A soiled baby, with a neglected nose, cannot be conscientiously regarded as a thing of beauty.”
– Mark Twain
1835-1910, American Humorist, Writer

This must have been one of those times when Twain was being serious.

“I don’t dislike babies, though I think very young ones rather disgusting.”
– Queen Victoria
1819-1901, Queen of Great Britain

This, from an era where lesbianism was perfectly legal and male homosexuality, illegal. Whatever.

More here:

http://workinghumor.com/quotes/babies.shtml

“Watching a baby being born is a little like watching a wet St. Bernard coming in through the cat door.” - Jeff Foxworthy.

How true.

“We have far too many kids. At one time in the playpen there was standing-room only. It looked like a bus stop for midgets. It used to get so damp in there, we’d have a rainbow above it. - Phyllis Diller.

That Phyllis Diller is so funny.

More:

http://www.gaia.com/quotes/topics/babies?page=2

“I didn’t know how babies were made until I was pregnant with my fourth child.” - Loretta Lynn

Lynn was married at the age of 14 to an older man where she was born and raised in Kentucky. Kind of a sad statement to not know that babies are the result of sexual intercourse. But that was back in in 1950’s.

I will just provide the link to the review and allow my readers to view the original piece. Frankly, Peck makes a number of good points and also explains how females in our society are thoroughly socialized into motherhood from a very early age. Few of these girls will ever make it to the questioning of this socialization - namely, the childfree women of America. It is a good read and recommended for everyone who does not want to “follow the crowd.”

This is a great article.

http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/families/article5919880.ece

March 17, 2009

Ten things they never tell you about motherhood

There’s a conspiracy of silence about motherhood, argues our writer. From schoolgate gossips to bed-wetting, here is her guide for Mother’s Day.

Sarah Vine

Motherhood is one of the great obsessions of our age. Everyone seems to have an opinion, even those who will never experience it (men), and those for whom it is a distant memory (grumpy old ladies). Whether you breast-feed or bottle-feed, give birth naturally or deliver by Caesarean, stay at home or return to work, the impression is that whatever you are doing, it’s almost certainly wrong.

The most curious aspect of this is that much of the pressure comes not from some patriarchal conspiracy, but from women. Even the National Childbirth Trust recently stated that it wants to see the use of epidurals during labour reduced by 40 per cent to “boost traditional births” - aka “agonising pain”.
Most confusing of all is what a friend of mine calls “the conspiracy of silence”: the abyss that exists between what people will tell you about having children and what it really entails. The truth is, as my mother once remarked darkly, that if women thought properly about having children, no one would ever give birth again.

Here then are ten things about motherhood that no one will tell you.

1. Bottoms
Motherhood, especially in the early years, is a scatological business. You will find yourself responsible for more dung than the keeper of the elephant enclosure at London Zoo. As a result, things that would once have made you gag are now mild inconveniences. At 3am, when your youngest, all snuggly next to you, covers your side of the bed in a wet, warm pool of wee, you don’t leap out and strip the sheets. Oh no: you stagger to the bathroom, grab a few towels, cover the wet patch and go back to sleep. You get to the stage when having “a little bit of wee, Mummy” on your trousers is normal. You will get used to sharing a lavatory cubicle with at least one other person, sometimes two or three on an outing. With a son you will, at some time, have to hold his willy when he goes to the loo.

2. Partners
You know those frazzled couples you used to see around at weekends? The ones who don’t appear to have washed or ironed their clothes? They call each other “Mummy” and “Daddy”, even though they once had names of their own. Their vocabulary now consists of a series of stock phrases: “You can’t have another Lego Star Wars Space Ship”; or “You can have an ice-cream, but only if you eat your broccoli.” Don’t get too cross with these couples. Remember, they’ve been up since 6am and they probably haven’t had sex for, ooh, about a thousand years. And crucially, one day that might be you.

3. Making a fool of yourself
It doesn’t matter how cool you are, once you have children you will snort like a piggy-wig, neigh like a horse, run through the park shouting “Here comes the wibble-monster”. Sometimes this can be liberating. Other times it’s just very, very embarrassing.

4. The body
Despite what the manuals tell you, pregnancy is not a return journey. Your back may go; your arches may fall; you will get brown spots on your skin. There may be whole areas of your body that you no longer recognise: Caesarians leave you with a weird stomach overhang; a natural birth means you will never again perform star jumps with confidence. Pilates, yoga, Power Plate. All these help. But unless you work at it like Madonna, you will never be box-fresh again.

5. The school gate
For some, an opportunity to display to the world their offspring’s brilliance. For others, a Dantesque vision of Hell. You’ll know which within seconds of your child’s first day at nursery.

6. Celebrity mothers
The only secret to the marvel of the celebrity mother, with her flat stomach, her 6in heels and her sexy husband, is this: 24-hour childcare. Don’t believe the hype.

7. Single friends
It can be hard, not to say very dull, for your childless friends when you turn into a milk-obsessed insomniac whose idea of spontaneity is giving her baby puréed avocado instead of banana for tea. Your friends’ obsession with the banal issues of life, such as whether to invest in this season’s new jump-suit, can seem absurdly indulgent. Besides, you are secretly jealous. Yet if you can both curb your tongue, a childless friend is often the best a mother can have - someone to talk to about the important issues in life; someone who will remind you that you once had an identity of your own and that there is more to life than school admission procedures.

8. Sleep
Unless you happen to be SAS trained, there is nothing that can prepare you for the effects of the prolonged sleep deprivation that comes with having children. They will wake you once, twice, three times in the night; if you have two, they will wake in relays, so as to inflict maximum damage. Should you attempt any sort of alcohol-based evening celebration, you can guarantee that the children will wake an hour and a half before they usually do, with twice the energy.

9 Birthing pools
If you like the idea of sitting in your own bodily fluids, then fine. If not, well, not. I know a man who had to perform an unpleasant fishing operation using the kitchen sieve during the later stages of his wife’s labour. He has never recovered.

10. The Fear
The most agonising aspect of motherhood is the terrible fear that you may lose your child. With the fear comes guilt, worry and, occasionally, panic. There is little you can do about this, except push it to the back of your mind, avoid listening to certain news reports - and pray that it never happens to you.
What we learnt the hard way

“No one explains to you how unnerving it is to be faced with this tiny replica of yourself, and all of your faults. I can be quite stubborn and argumentative and it’s shocking to deal with someone who’s absolutely the same. I say to my son, ‘you don’t have to win every argument’, but they drink in your example. I think he’s being unreasonable and then realise he is just doing exactly what I do!”
Diane Abbott, MP

“If only I’d realised that, no matter how hard I battled, I would lose control of my life. Before I had children I think I believed that, with a little discipline and organisation, I could be in charge. I couldn’t grasp that motherhood isn’t like that - you can’t schedule croup or projectile vomiting or a tantrum. You just have to go with it. I fought that randomness for a while, but I’ve admitted defeat.”
Mary Nightingale, newsreader

“No one told me how painful it is once you start breast-feeding. It’s like having two rocks on your chest and it hurts like hell. Midwives suggest Savoy cabbage - it stinks but it does work. So you’re sitting there with cold cabbage from the fridge flat on your chest to take away some of the pain. Having a baby is definitely not sexy, but you really don’t care.”
Alison Lapper, artist

“All moveable objects will never be where you think they are. I never know where my hairbrush is because someone’s taken it, there’s no Sellotape, the scissors are never where you normally keep them. At first I found it intensely irritating, but after a while you become quite sentimental about it all. Apart from those high-pitched screams - I’ve never got used to those.”
Daisy Waugh, writer

“The one thing that nobody explained to me was the lack of sleep. I was someone who liked a lie-in, so being up every two hours was certainly interesting. People said to me, in that mumsy whisper: ‘You have to try to sleep when the baby sleeps.’ But if I did that nothing would ever get done. When would you put a wash on, or eat, or have a cup of tea?”
Edith Bowman, DJ

“One minute you’re happy soaking in the bath, wondering what life would be like with three in the house rather than two, and before you know it you’re crawling around on all fours trying to entertain the new baby and dreams of soaking in a long, hot bath are just that - a dream.”
Ruth Kelly, MP
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Obsession is right - obsessing over whether motherhood is really all that glamorous and if it’s to really be envied (here we go once again with the holding up of a baby and screaming to the world “Look at what I have!” mentality). This statement really stands out:

“The truth is, as my mother once remarked darkly, that if women thought properly about having children, no one would ever give birth again.”

Ah, ‘thought’ - that magic word that nobody ever engages in when they run through the sheets. Nope, they do not use their brain to think with (if they have one) before doing it. Ignorant people who allow their hormones to take over their peanut-sized brains while they squeeze them out. The truth of the matter is, most childfree people (and men in general) simply do not envy women who have to take care of babies. A baby is nothing to be envied. One is better off envying Bill Gates for his fabulous wealth than envying a sixteen year old girl for her baby.

The celebrity mothers bit tells it like it is. Let’s face it, they can crank them out, then hire a $5,000.00 per hour daycare nurse to tend to the dirty diapers, feedings, and what not. The reality is that no ordinary American woman can afford that sort of help and is left to care for the child on her own. The partners fact is just as true. Married couples are too busy caring for the screaming sprog. And once they have to contend with that, from where will they get the energy to make love without having the sprog interrupt tham at night? If they’re smart, if they finally do get that sort of time, they will learn to use birth control for a change.

On to the comments part of the article: the only one that made any sense was Cleo’s. The “Why do some people breed without doing their homework first” statement. Well, it’s like this: People sprog because “everyone else does it.” People do not think when they sprog. In fact, being a sheeple is, um, automatic self-conformity. In the Land of the Free, Home of the Brave, who wants to make a choice of their own? It really is much better for some people to have society to tell them what to do, what to think, what to eat, when to have (haha) sex, and when to breed. Maybe some people need to be told how to live. The real adults do not need that sort of nonsense in their lives. It is great, however, to read an article like this that deglamourizes motherhood.

http://www.popeater.com/music/article/kelly-clarkson-has-no-desire-for-kids/376529

For Clarkson, No Kids Would Not Suck

March 10, 2009
Kelly Clarkson’s plate is too chocked full of hit singles and concert dates to be thinking about actual dates or marriage right now, and the ‘My Life Would Suck Without You’ singer says in a new interview that being a rock star “is too selfish” of an enterprise for her to be a good mom.
“Oh, my God, I have no desire. I would not be a good mother,” Clarkson, 26, tells USA Today about having kids. “I used to want to, like, adopt 10 kids — because I had friends who were adopted, and I thought that was the coolest thing, to be chosen. But again, my job is too selfish.” She has a little more leeway when it comes to getting hitched some day. “I’m not against it,” she says about marriage. “If I found a guy who could handle my job, that would be cool. But I’ve dated a couple of guys who were awesome, and the celebrity part of my life and the traveling part are hard to get around.” In the meantime, Clarkson is content with keeping her personal life simple and as free from the limelight as possible, including her choice to live in a very un-Hollywood setting. “I live on a ranch in Texas and do my own thing,” she says. “And I don’t care what anyone has to say about it. My joke is that the only people I’m trying to please are myself and my fans, because they’re the ones buying my records. And I have the best, most loyal fan base ever.”
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It’s actually refreshing to read about Clarkson’s choice instead of opening up the latest celebrity fashion blog with a “So-and-so is pregnant with her fifth kid!” nonsense. Her decision to remain childfree shows that she does not follow the crowd like the rest of the sheep do. Individual thinking seems to be rare in Hollywood these days where a liberal mindset prevails. If and when Clarkson decided to get married, hopefully her partner will also be as childfree as she is. Being childfree should be the Number One discussion before getting married - even before the money discussion takes place. Evaluating why one gets married is the most important thing. Marriage is not just something “everyone does” - once it is done for that purpose, it loses its meaning, if it had any meaning to begin with. The old fashioned values of real relationships are still valued by some Americans. Marriage and parenthood no longer have that “It must be done for public approval” sanction in a nation where one should be free to make the choice of how one wants to live their life. If anything, Clarkson is not being selfish for not having kids. She knows herself well enough to make that decision. More power to her.

Chances are the bottle had a label the woman did not read. But continue anyways:

http://news.aol.com/article/daycare-windshield-wiper-fluid/381420

Day Care Mistakenly Gives Kids Car Fluid

By JON GAMBREL,

March 13, 2009

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (March 13) - Ten children at a day care center drank windshield wiper fluid after a staffer served it from a container mistaken for Kool-Aid and placed in a refrigerator, authorities said Friday.

The day care owner surrendered her state license Friday.

Doctors estimate the children, ages 2 to 7, drank about an ounce of the blue fluid late Thursday afternoon before realizing it tasted wrong, said Laura James, a pediatric pharmacologist and toxicologist at Arkansas Children’s Hospital in Little Rock.

Only one child remained hospitalized Friday morning, after blood samples showed “measurable levels” of methanol, a highly toxic alcohol that can induce comas and cause blindness, officials said. The day care also provided the fluid for testing.

The windshield wiper fluid was bought with several other items on a recent shopping trip, James told The Associated Press. “This product was mistakenly grabbed and thought to be Kool-Aid and put in the refrigerator,” she said.

The day care’s operator, Carolyn Bynum, was interviewed Friday by child welfare investigators and gave up her license, said Julie Munsell, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Human Services. Bynum declined to comment to The Associated Press.

“She was so upset about what had occurred and she was definitely worried some of the children had been injured,” Munsell said. “It was just a mistake, she says. She says it was just a horrible mistake.”

Bynum’s license had allowed her to care for 10 children in her home in Scott, about 15 miles east of Little Rock. Munsell said Bynum had no found complaints or serious compliance issues in the past.

By surrendering her license, Bynum can no longer care for children without reapplying.

The toxicologist warned that many antifreeze or windshield wiper solutions have bright colors, which can be mistaken for fruit drinks.

“I think the take-home message is not to have these products in the kitchen or where you’re doing any kind of food preparation,” she said.
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There is a lot that is wrong here. Am I to assume the woman never read the label on the windshield wiper fluid before she stuck it in the refrigerator? Maybe it is worth noting that this sort of thing is not a normal habit of most daycare workers. Maybe it sounds too suspicious, since nobody makes a “mistake” like that. Taking care of ten children that belong to other people in one’s home is a bit too much, but still, there is just no leeway for an incident like this to happen. Bynum will have to seek a different job now but my advice would be, get one that does not entail reading anything, period. Not for awhile anyways. Hopefully the kids who drank the fluid will be all right and not get too sick. Again - nobody makes a “mistake” like that.

Living in the middle of Sprog Central (Tucson, Arizona to outsiders) when one comes across the relative of a fellow employee, one does not become too surprised when one hears that the sixteen year old relative has visitation rights. Yes, you heard right. So it appears the girl who got pregnant by this nice looking young man has physical custody of the child (who knows how old the kid is - in this city, the offspring could be as old as eight) while the very young father gets to see the child twice a week. I mean, this guy isn’t even old enough to vote, never mind old enough to legally drink alcohol. Yes, he is still in high school, thank goodness, although I do not know the educational fate of the girl. Hearing this sort of thing makes me at a loss for words but all I can think of is, “F’ed up big time.” No pun intended of course, since triple X-rated behavior seems to be the norm in a city that reputedly claims to be family oriented and family friendly. Yes, I know the two concepts radically contradict each other. But whatever. However this is not the first time I have met a teen who is a parent. I’d see many at the mall where I used to work - 15, 16 year old girls with strollers and infants in tow, sometimes with the boyfriend, sometimes with another girlfriend and her rugrat. Tucson is supposedly a “red” city, meaning it is largely conservative, yet out of wedlock sex prevails big time. It’s not just the Catholic population, either, although there has always been a very high rate of Mexican girls who get pregnant as teens. The non-Mexicans are quickly catching up when it comes to the premarital birth statistics. Ultimately the tax payer has to pick up the tab in these cases. It can be a challenge to be childfree where we live as my husband and I are but at least we have a real relationship versus those who are just crotchloafing.

http://www.slate.com/id/2212816/

Too Many Kiddie Cooks Spoil the Broth: Why the child foodie movement has got to go.

By Regina Schrambling

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

For the last few years, the most burning question in the food world has been: Is there any phenomenon more annoying than Rachael Ray? And, finally, we have the answer: Absolutely.

Call it “a little child shall lead you.” First there was the 12-year-old “restaurant critic,” David Fishman in New York City, whose “review” of a neighborhood salumeria somehow snared him huge coverage in his hometown paper and then a long appearance on the CBS morning show, replete with warnings that his power had local chefs quaking in their clogs. Next a 5-year-old, Julian Kreusser, was touted for his cooking show on public access television in Portland, OR., with the Times of London warning that he might get a cookbook deal at an age when most kids need In the Night Kitchen read to them. Now the New York Times Magazine has pledged one-quarter of its monthly food real estate to the kitchen exploits of a 4-year-old, Dexter Wells, who just happens to be the firstborn of the newspaper’s food editor, Pete Wells.

Presenting children as inspiration is troublesome not least because kitchens are not nurseries. Check out the Wrestler-worthy scars on real chefs’ bodies, and you can see why. Reading Pete Wells’ most recent piece, on overseeing his son at the stove, had me conjuring the horrific tale of late Republican strategist Lee Atwater’s toddler brother, burned to death when a pot full of boiling oil spilled over on him. Watching the Oregon whiz kid cram clementines into a food processor reminded me of how Philadelphia chef Georges Perrier famously lost several digit-tips with the same tool, and he had decades more experience with its blades.

And then there is the problem of what children produce. The “Yummy Yummy Citrus Boys” Julian Kreusser allegedly invented, demonstrated over 18 very long minutes, look to be perfectly ordinary cookies (the ratio of butter to flour seems stingy to this old baker), though I couldn’t bear to sit through the cooking lesson again to get the recipe. So I opted instead to try his widely distributed recipe for zucchini chcolate-chip bread, which yielded everything I dread. It was gooey, due to a cup of molasses, a cup of sugar, and chocolate chips, and it was as subtly flavored as an all-day sucker. (I had to guess the pan size, and I knew enough to let the thing bake 60 minutes, not the 30 “he” prescribed.) Fortunately, the New York Times spares us from the recipe for the perfectly dreadful-sounding vegetable pies Dexter Wells decides to make, but we do hear about his insistence on grinding coffee beans just so for a morning brew he won’t even be able to drink. While the tangerine sherbet he inspired his dad to develop wasn’t bad, the gelatin and the excessive labor of zesting and juicing the tangerines guarantee I will never bother with it again.

No matter how precocious the kid, it’s difficult for him to truly educate and enlighten adults. Nature might trump nurture here. While children do have taste buds that adults do not—inside their cheeks and on their palates rather than only on the tongue—studies at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia have found that children are always worse than adults at flavor identification simply because they are less experienced eaters. According to food psychologist and scientist Dr. Marcia Pelchat, even if children like something, they cannot qualify how good it is because they lack the necessary math skills to do so. Studies at the center have also determined that children favor sweet to savory more than adults (this may be an evolutionary issue–children need more energy because they are active and growing, and sweet foods generally have more calories), and they tend to reject vegetables (possibly because they’re unfamiliar, partly because of their individual genetic makeup) and, often, meat.

I can hear all the parents insisting, “My child is different. He eats what I do.” Sure, there are ways to help influence a child’s tolerance or penchant for sophisticated flavors—dining out, helping in the kitchen, being exposed to strong flavors (spicy food, for example) via amniotic fluid or breast milk. But Pelchat says, “Even those kids eat like children.”

This is partially because children rank texture above taste. Sliminess, according to Pelchat, is a total turnoff (at least in our culture; it’s all in what kids are used to). They also do not develop a taste for salt until they are about 5 months old, but from then on they like higher levels of salt than adults do.

Finally, consider what impact memory has on your food. People lose their sense of smell as they age, so our bodies compensate for that loss by allowing memory to help us know what we’re eating. What’s one thing 5-year-olds are lacking? Remembrances of madeleines past. Or even of cheeseburgers or tacos past.

I’m not saying children cannot be skewed by food snobs who hang out on Chowhound. Dr. Perri Klass, a professor of pediatrics and journalism at New York University, recalls the 4-year-old friend her daughter once brought home for a sleepover who rejected what she was serving for dinner and demanded noodles with pesto. Taken aback, Klass offered to run to the corner store, and the friend informed her contemptuously: “You don’t buy pesto. You make pesto.”

Even those of us who make pesto can’t please children, though. I will never forget the first time I brought some carefully crafted tidbits involving goat cheese and roasted peppers to a party where a toddler was indulgently allowed to grab one with a grubby hand only to spit it out on the carpet.

But this is not just me yelling at kids to get off my lawn—I’m willing to set aside the annoying narcissism of parents who believe they have spawned a cross between Ferran Adria and Brillat-Savarin. On a larger scale, the trend emphasizes the worst of the food frenzy today: the celebration of celebrity and novelty over authenticity and seriousness. Julia Child was 50 years old before she flipped her first omelet on television. She got that gig only after studying at the Cordon Bleu and then devoting 10 years to perfecting “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” with two collaborators. Today chefs barely out of high school are competing on reality cooking shows, and the bar keeps being lowered, with Internet exposure for every little Thomas Keller. The movement devalues the very subject it pretends to celebrate. As Pelchat put it: “Kids would be excellent culinary guides. For food for other kids.”

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That’s fine and well that kids can prepare simple, sweet snacks in the kitchen but when it comes to real cooking, kids just don’t get it. Most of them don’t even have a vocabulary that includes the words fricasse and braise. So, why the hoopla over children who have a cooking show. Yes, it is all because of the “parents” - those who think their angel is just so special, smart and brilliant with a whisk and the kid is smart enough not to get burned or cut open with a Ginsu knife while performing all of those cooking stunts like the chefs at Benihana do.

It is questionable for many people, not just the childfree community, about children being presented as “inspiration.” It is not just food, as the above article states, but just about anywhere else in our society. Children as “inspiration” for the adult world, is, well, not real inspiration at all. No matter how smart or clever a child might be, there is just no way any child can ever inspire an adult to create a work of art, make a great finding in science, or anything along that line. Years ago such inspiration for things of that nature was credited to what was above - not that which comes from “below.” Adults cannot learn from children, period, no matter what it is that a child does. Adults can learn from other adults, particularly the elderly (just think about it: in many other cultures, the elderly and not children are looked to for guidance and advice, simply because they have lived that long to experience it. Children, well, they are on the undeveloped side in so many ways. But I digress.). McDonald-like french fries may appeal to the kiddie chef and his or her little friends but most adults prefer real food.

Can you imagine a woman so desperately burning for a child that she mutilates her boyfriend in the process? That is exactly what happened to a guy in England. The following is not for the faint of heart. Read on:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/tyne/7923986.stm

March 5, 2009

A Tyneside woman deliberately bit off her boyfriend’s tongue during a drunken birthday kiss, a court has heard.

Tracy Davies, 40, bit a third of Mark Coghill’s tongue off, Newcastle Crown Court was told.

They were celebrating Mr Coghill’s 45th birthday at his Newcastle bedsit in October 2008, when she grew upset because she was not pregnant.

Ms Davies of Sunderland Road, Gateshead, denies one count of causing grievous bodily harm with intent.

The court heard how they went to a supermarket on 10 October, buying two bottles of vodka and food for the evening, before going to a pub together.

They returned to Mr Coghill’s home but Ms Davies grew upset because she wanted a baby but was not yet pregnant.

As Mr Coghill moved to comfort her, she asked him to kiss her, the court heard.

Julian Smith, prosecuting, said: “He did so and within a few seconds, she bit down hard on his tongue.

“Obviously this caused him pain, he pulled back, and the tongue had come clean off in her mouth.

“She had the piece of tongue in her mouth, he saw her take it from her mouth, and it fell to the floor.”

Mr Coghill, a former customer service advisor, told the court he could no longer work, struggled to speak, and had lost many of his taste buds.

“I will never enjoy a curry again,” he said. “I can’t distinguish between certain foods, like the difference between cheese and toast, and just toast.

“I can’t use my tongue for eating. Those are things you take for granted.”

‘You’re joking’

After the attack Ms Davies called an ambulance and paramedics then alerted police.

Mr Smith added: “She told police, ‘We have had a domestic. I have bitten his tongue off. Here it is’.”

He added that Ms Davies was surprised when police arrested her, telling officers: “You’re joking”.

Mr Coghill was treated at Newcastle General Hospital, but surgeons decided against trying to re-attach the torn section because of the danger of infection.

The trial continues.
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I always used to think it was bad enough when people bite each other while they run through the sheets but this is right up there with sicko women who bite off other parts of their male partner’s body, namely, the genitals. But hey, this woman had a reason to do what she did: she wanted a baby. She lusted for a child. It is disgusting and reprehensible what she did to the poor guy and she needs to be held accountable for her actions. Now that the media knows who Tracy Davies is, no man in his right mind will want to go anywhere near her. She will have a hard time making a baby right now without a guy. Coghill, if he is smart, will leave the cow and try to spend some time on himself for a change.

This is Davies:

The first thing that comes to mind is, trailer park resident.