Pendragons Princess

Bill Clinton gets all the credit for this one:

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Parenting/story?id=7693121&page=1

Teens: Oral Sex and Casual Prostitution No Biggie
Teens in Documentary Say Oral Sex ‘Not That Big of a Deal’ and Get Paid for Sexual Favors
By CLAIRE SHIPMAN and COLE KAZDIN
May 28, 2009

They don’t give their names, but viewers can see their faces plainly and what these teens are saying is shocking parents. Pre-teens and teens are engaging in sexual activity at an earlier age.

“I ended up having sex with more than one person that night and then in the morning I was trying to get morning-after pills,” one of the girls said. “I was, like, 14 at the time.”

It’s just one of dozens of stories from teenage girls in a new documentary by Canadian filmmaker Sharlene Azam that aims to shed light on the secret, extremely sexual lives of today’s teens.

Have a question about teens and oral sex? Click here and Claire Shipman may answer online. Also check out Claire Shipman’s blog by clicking here.

After four years researching for the documentary, Azam told “Good Morning America” that oral sex is as common as kissing for teens and that casual prostitution — being paid at parties to strip, give sexual favors or have sex — is far more commonplace than once believed.

“If you talk to teens [about oral sex] they’ll tell you it’s not a big deal,” Azam said. “In fact, they don’t consider it sex. They don’t consider a lot of things sex.”

Evidence of this casual attitude may be seen in the fact that more than half of all teens 15 to 19 years old have engaged in oral sex, according to a comprehensive 2005 study by the Centers for Disease Control’s National Center for Health Statistics.

‘Oral Sex Is the New Goodnight Kiss’

In the documentary, “Oral Sex Is the New Goodnight Kiss,” girls as young as 11 years old talk about having sex, going to sex parties and — in some extreme situations — crossing into prostitution by exchanging sexual favors for money, clothes or even homework and then still arriving home in time for dinner with the family.

“Five minutes and I got $100,” one girl said. “If I’m going to sleep with them, anyway, because they’re good-looking, might as well get paid for it, right?”

Another girl talked about being offered $20 to take off her shirt or $100 to do a striptease on a table at a party.

The girls are almost always from good homes, but their parents are completely unaware, Azam said.

“The prettiest girls from the most successful families [are the most at risk]. We’re not talking about marginalized girls,” she said. “[Parents] don’t want to know because they really don’t know what to do. I mean, you might be prepared to learn that, at age 12, your daughter has had sex, but what are you supposed to do when your daughter has traded her virginity for $1,000 or a new bag?”

Sex Favors Traded for Relationship Stability

For some of the girls, the sexual favors are not about clothes or money, but used to keep a relationship together in a chillingly objective way.

“I think there’s very much trading for relationship favors, almost like ‘you need to do this [to] stay in this relationship,’” one girl told “Good Morning America.”

“There’s a lot of social pressure,” said another. “Especially because of our age, a lot of girls want to be in a relationship and they’re willing to do anything.”

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I find it hard to believe that teens nowadays do not know the word “No” on any level. “No” here doesn’t just mean “No, I won’t have sex with you” but “No, I do not discuss that with others”, referring to sexual activity with peers. Even if a teen is sexually active, that remains no one else’s business except the teens involved (and hopefully their parents). Of course, even there I do not encourage the practice of teens engaging in a behavior they should not be doing to begin with.

From where are these kids learning sexual behavior? It seems like a ridiculous question, but when I was that age, I had no knowledge of sex or how to make babies. My parents did not consider it “important knowledge for children.” I did know English and American literature, Spanish, French, history, biology, chemistry, and a number of other elect courses in school. Something which a lot of today’s teens do not know since they are too busy screwing around with each other in the classroom.

And seriously, the girl who was seeking the morning after pill after having sex? What sort of cluelessness does she suffer from? Today’s kids are ignorant about sex and how it can cause children. Once a girl gets pregnant, her life is over with. Studies have shown that teen girls who get pregnant drop out of high school and wind up with low paying jobs. Is that something to aspire to? What is wrong with these kids?

The biggest question of all: Where are these kids parents, if they have any? Eleven year old girls attending sex parties? Excuse me? Shouldn’t they be playing with their Barbie dolls at that age and taking ballet lessons? Maybe the parents of these little girls should be whipped. But no, they suffer from the “My kid would never do that” syndrome.

Lastly, girls who think that having sex with a boy will “mark them” are more naive than they think they are. In no way does having sex make a relationship. Neither does having sex cause a relationship to deepen. And as Ellen Peck said, having a baby is not a sign of perfect love under any circumstances whatsoever: a baby is simply the sign of someone who is sexually active, nothing more, and nothing less. The same goes for so-called “married” couples, too. “Married” as in idiots like Jon and Kate Gosselin and it’s questionable that they have a relationship, too.

Maybe humans need to spend less time proving to the world their private parts are in working order, and more time actually contributing something productive to human society.

I am sure no one will dispute the following article. The real parents who actually raise their kids with some sense of values and ethics are an exception, not the rule. Read on:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30585984/

Today’s tykes: Secure kids or rudest in history?
Parents’ focus on building self-esteem may neglect compassion for others

By Susan Gregory Thomas
May 6, 2009

The little wagon seemed abandoned.

So when Ada Calhoon’s 1-year-old son spotted it during an outing to a neighborhood park, he began playing with it. But almost immediately, they heard a little boy on a far-away swing set shriek “Noooooooooooo!” sending his mom storming toward them.

“Rather than saying, ‘We’re swinging now. You can let that baby look at your wagon,’ [the mother] took the wagon out of my son’s hands and brought it to her son in the swing,” says Calhoun, the editor-in-chief of the popular parenting Web site Babble.com.

It wasn’t the child’s fit that left Calhoun speechless: It was the mother’s.

Parenting blogs — and grandparents — echo that shock. A commenter on a recent New York Times’ blog recounted seeing a preschooler purposely trip a woman in a crowded restaurant, and chortle, “‘Mommy, did you see me trip that woman? I tripped her!’” — with no corrective measure from the mother. On Grandparents.com, a mortified grandmother recently asked for advice on how to handle her grandson’s relentless public insulting of his own mother, who apparently seemed unable or unwilling to stand up to the mistreatment.

Many experts say today’s kids are ruder than ever. And it may have something to do with popular parenting movements focusing on self-esteem and the generation that’s embracing them: Generation X, or those born between 1965 and 1977.

On paper, it doesn’t add up. After all, by many accounts Generation X may be the most devoted parents in American history. They are champions of “attachment parenting,” the school of child-rearing that calls for a high level of closeness between parents and children, Many Gen-X parents co-sleep with their children, hold them back from entering kindergarten if they feel their children’s emotional maturity is at stake and volunteer at their kids’ schools at record rates. Gen-X moms have been famously criticized by early feminists for dropping out of the workforce to care for their young children.

Yet, their kids are, well, rude. It may be that today’s parents are so fixated on their children’s emotional well-being that they’re teaching them that the well-being of others is comparatively unimportant, says Dr. Philippa Gordon, a long-time pediatrician in Park Slope, Brooklyn, an urban New York neighborhood famous for its dense Gen-X parent population.

Parents ‘ferociously advocating’

“I see parents ferociously advocating for their children, responding with hostility to anyone they perceive as getting in the child’s way — from a person whose dog snuffles inquiringly at a baby in a carriage, to a teacher or coach whom they perceive is slighting their child, to a poor, hapless doctor who cannot cure the common cold,” says Gordon. “There is a feeling that anything interfering with their kid’s homeostasis, as they see it, is an inappropriate behavior to be fended off sharply.”

Such defensiveness represents a radical departure from Gen X’s parental forebears, who, experts say, were more concerned about their children’s behavior toward others, rather than the other way around. But it also may highlight what makes many of today’s parents tick, as a group — specifically, how they themselves grew up.

Many researchers consider members of Generation X to have been among the least nurtured children in American history with half coming from split families, 40 percent raised as latchkey kids — literally, home alone.

“They are trying to heal the wounds from their own childhoods through their children,” says Dr. Michael Brody, a child psychiatrist and chair of the Television and Media Committee of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

In indulging their children’s moods, Brody argues, some parents may be trying to protect their children from experiencing the kind of anxiety and neglect that they themselves suffered as youngsters.

Attachment parenting or enmeshment?
But not being able to separate their own feelings from their children’s has its costs. “Generation X parents seem to have mistaken emotional ‘enmeshment’ for ‘attachment parenting,’” he says.

To be fair, such a response comes from an understandable place.

“Our parents, the Boomers, didn’t pay so much attention to us — they were getting divorced and working and respecting independence, so they left us a lot of times to Scooby Doo,” says Calhoun. “But we’re going a bit far in the other direction and paying so much attention that we’re picking up on every blip in our kids’ whims.”

But not all this can be laid at Generation X’s door. Dr. Susan Linn , who teaches psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and is director of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, points out that children learn societal values not just through parental modeling, but also from the stories and toys passed on to them.

“Commercial culture tends to glorify negative behaviors on the continuum from rudeness to violence,” says Linn. “Anti-social behaviors capture the attention of viewers and add to audience share, and in a world where physical violence reigns, rudeness seems ordinary — it becomes a behavioral norm.”

Just take a quick survey the most popular commercial offerings for kids, Linn says. On “American Idol,” which, according to Nielsen ratings, is a top program among 2- to 11-year-old viewers, the judges aren’t just rude but truly scathing to contestants.

And, of course, a best-selling line of dolls is, literally, named Bratz. That message pales in comparison to the video game franchise “Grand Theft Auto,” a perennial best-seller among teens and pre-teens who spend hours engaging in virtual behaviors ranging from bullying to having sex with a prostitute and then killing her. Younger siblings who emulate their older brothers and sisters are peripherally, but routinely, exposed to such violence in large numbers, says Linn.

Preschool delinquents?
It is also worth underlining that rudeness can have more serious behavioral consequences. As a 2005 Yale study demonstrated, preschool students are expelled at a rate more than three times that of children in grades K-12 because of behavioral problems.

What does this mean for their future as adults? We may be starting to see some of the effects in Generation Y, those born between 1980 and 1996, whose self-centered — if not downright arrogant — workplace behavior has been well-documented in the popular press since the mid-2000s.

“They’ve grown up questioning their parents, and now they’re questioning their employers. They don’t know how to shut up, which is great, but that’s aggravating to the 50-year-old manager who says, ‘Do it and do it now,’ ” says Jordan Kaplan, an associate managerial science professor at Long Island University-Brooklyn in New York, in a USA Today article.

As for today’s little kids? “No one will want to hire them,” says Brody. That’s not an encouraging thought, especially in these economic times.
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This next generation of kids will have a very hard time adjusting to adulthood. Why? Simply because they will think the world revolves aroun them and that others should drop whatever they are doing to serve them. Now that we have seen what our entitlements minded society has done to destroy the younger generation, everyone will wind up paying for these spoiled kids. But, some parents think their precious snowflake from seventh heaven should be worshipped by the rest of the planet. Talk about failing to live in reality. Child worship does not benefit the child being worshipped and the evidence is clear.

This is absolutely sick.

http://www.nwfdailynews.com/news/woman-17605-old-crying.html

Crying baby in filthy apartment leads to woman’s arrest

May 22, 2009

Wendy Victora

Daily News

FORT WALTON BEACH — A 20-year-old woman was arrested and charged with child abuse Thursday, the day after deputies found a 7-month old baby alone and crying in her filthy apartment.

The baby girl was strapped in a car seat, wearing a diaper overflowing with urine and fecal matter, according to an Okaloosa County Sheriff’s Office offense report.

The neighbor who called police said she had seen Jennifer D’Silva leave her Beverly Street apartment at about 5:30 Tuesday evening and had not seen her return.

The woman said she went outside her apartment at about 7:30 Wednesday morning and heard the baby crying. She said she knocked, but when no one answered she called for help.

The deputy was also unable to get anyone to answer. When the property manager unlocked the apartment, the deputies could smell “a strong odor of fecal matter and decay,” according to the report.

Inside, he saw the baby lying strapped in a car seat with no top on, partially covered with a bed sheet that appeared to be blood-stained. The car seat was on the floor in front of the TV and surrounded by dirty diapers, trash, empty rash ointment bottles and dirty wipes.

The rest of the apartment was in a similar state of disarray.

The deputy who changed the baby’s diaper noticed that she had a rash and blisters in her vaginal area, some of which were open.

The baby was taken to the Children’s Advocacy Center for a medical examination, where doctors said the baby’s head was misshapen and she has a weak muscular structure, possibly from being restrained in a car seat for extended periods of time.

The baby also had a rash, blisters and a yeast infection caused by urine burns and fecal matter, the report said.

Investigators accessed D’Silva’s Myspace page and found numerous photos of her hanging out at what appear to be clubs and parties, despite the fact that she is underage.

Some of the dates and comments coincided with times that the neighbor told police she had heard the baby crying, but did not see D’Silva’s car parked outside.

The neighbor said she had started to watch D’Silva after noticing that the woman left frequently but never took the baby with her.

Police recognized D’Silva’s “partner” from her Myspace page and found the woman’s address. They arrested D’Silva there Thursday.

She told them she would not talk with them until she had talked to her lawyer. She was fingerprinted and her Myspace documentation was entered into evidence, the report said.
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I cannot even begin to imnagine the filth and squalor this innocent baby had to live with. There are so many children who need to be rescued from their parents it’s not even funny. A 20 year old girl, out partying, while her child is strapped to a car seat in an apartment. How barbaric is that. It’s easy to see that no father of the baby was around, either, of course. I am too disgusted to even repeat the childed mantra “It’s different when it’s your own” because as far as I can see, this woman does not deserve to have children on any level. Hopefully the baby will recover from her rashes, blisters, be cleaned up properly, given the proper nutrition, and placed in a proper home where she can be cared for and nurtured.

Minor on auction site bids on and wins a digger.

No, not a toy Tonka digger; a real life digger that is generally used to dig out holes in the ground for building foundations. Caterpillar is one such company that manufactures these diggers. Read on:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090522/ap_on_fe_st/as_odd_new_zealand_big_toy

Toddler buys earthmover in online auction

WELLINGTON, New Zealand – A New Zealand mom made some online bids on toys before napping. Then her 3-year-old daughter took over and bought a bigger plaything than expected — a huge earth-moving digger for a cool $12,300.

Pipi Quinlan made the winning 20,000 New Zealand dollar ($12,300) bid on the Kobelco digger with a few mouse clicks at the auction site TradeMe while her parents slept, the Rodney Times newspaper reported in northern New Zealand.

“The first I knew about it was when I came down and opened up the computer,” said Pipi’s mother, Sarah Quinlan.

“I saw an e-mail from TradeMe saying I had won an auction and another e-mail from the seller saying something like `I think you’ll love this digger,’” she was quoted as saying in the paper.

Quinlan said she had made auction bids on several toy sets and assumed she had bought a toy digger.

“It wasn’t until I went back and reread the e-mails that I saw $20,000 — and got the shock of my life.”

She immediately called the auction site and the seller to explain what happened.

TradeMe reimbursed the seller’s costs for the auction and the digger was relisted.

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I can’t say I feel sorry for the parents since their sleep time was obviously more important than keeping an eye on their toddler while the toddler played on the computer. Were these parents naive enough to think a three year old doesn’t know how to place bids on an auction site? *chuckle* Well I’m sure the seller had as good a laugh over the incident, too. Oh, it is a bit of a hassle to relist an item from a non-paying bidder - I am an ebay seller myself so I’ve been there and done that - but at least the seller gets relisting and final auction value fees reimbursed. Although I hope the seller of the digger eventually sells it for a profit. And that Sarah Quinlan doesn’t allow her very young daughter access to ebay anymore. Doesn’t she know that one has to be at least eighteen years old to do business on that auction site? Duh. No, in her case, a moo.

It looks like one very young mother did not want to have a child, after all. Sorry Ma’am, the playground sandbox is not the child return counter. Read on:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090521/ap_on_re_us/us_playground_body

Police: Mom of buried NM boy said she killed him
AP

Associated Press Writer Heather Clark, May 21, 2009

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. – Police say the mother of 3-year-old boy found buried at New Mexico playground told investigators she intentionally suffocated him.

Albuquerque Police Chief Ray Schultz says 23-year-old Tiffany Toribio was arrested early Thursday.

He says the Toribio told officers she had taken her son, Ty Toribio, to Alvarado Park, where she placed her hand over his nose and mouth and suffocated him.

The boy’s body was found Friday.

Police say Toribio told them she didn’t want an attorney. Attempts to reach Toribio’s mother for comment were not immediately successful.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — A 23-year-old woman whose son hasn’t been seen for over a week has been arrested in the death of a 3- to 4-year-old boy found buried in the sand at a New Mexico playground.

Albuquerque court records show Tiffany Toribio was arrested early Thursday on an open count of murder and several counts of child abuse resulting in death. She’s being held on $250,000 bond.

Police Chief Ray Schultz says Toribio is a transient who had stayed at a home several blocks from Alvarado Park, where the unidentified boy’s body was found last Friday.

Family members and others contacted police after investigators released an image of the boy. Relatives said the image was similar to Toribio’s 3-year-old son, who hadn’t been seen since May 12.

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At some point, the federal government will have to issue licenses to breed. I really do not care if some people will complain about this license or not. Until human beings recognize that what they are bringing into the world is a human being and not a piece of inanimate property, the so-called “right to breed” is going to have to be treated as a privilege and responsibility. It looks like Tiffany Toribio proved to the world she makes a bad parent. File this one under “She had a baby in order to see if she was going to be a good parent or not.” Well, sterilization will help solve that problem.

I call this equal opportunity “escaping parenthood.” Read on:

http://www.newsweek.com/id/192463

Slouching Toward Fatherhood

I thought being a dad would come easily to me. But soon after my son’s birth, I was looking for a way out.

By Joel Schwartzberg | NEWSWEEK

Published Apr 4, 2009

From the magazine issue dated Apr 13, 2009

Nearly every night of the first few weeks of my son’s life, I’d click him into the back seat of our minivan and drive him around until he fell asleep. Like so many babies lulled by the humming of tires on pavement, the kid conked out in 10 minutes, but I’d continue on to the closest Dunkin’ Donuts with an all-night drive-thru window, nearly an hour away.

My wife and I made this arrangement to allow her some precious sleep, but as I volunteered for chauffeur duty again and again—each time coming home later and later—we both knew there was more going on than her exhaustion and my craving for doughnuts.

In the parking lot, I would pray my son would stay asleep and not set my already-frayed nerves on fire. I’d cram those doughnuts into my mouth as if they were the last delicious things on earth.

These were the tiny, fleeting pleasures I clung to after my son was born. They felt like all I had left. When a child was added to my life, it was as if something enormous and coveted was subtracted in return, and the transaction left me reeling, like someone who’d just gambled away his soul.

I fell into a well of depression so deep I wasn’t even aware of it. It was only years later, after I spoke to a psychotherapist, that I learned I was experiencing male postpartum depression. It seems ridiculous on its face: men don’t do the hard work of carrying a pregnancy for nine months. We don’t have to bear the pains of labor. We never had an umbilical connection to our children. We just have to hang on tight. But giving my emotions a name, and an explanation, helped me feel less alone and better able to cut myself some slack. Before then, even calling it depression felt like an excuse for weak, pathetic behavior.

This was not what I expected from fatherhood. I was 31 and thought I’d slide into it easily. “What’s a little sleep deprivation?” parents-to-be tell themselves. We got through college, after all. But not 48 hours after we returned home with our boy, a truth dawned on me with shocking force: my life was gone. Movies, sleeping, long showers—all gone. We became slaves to this tiny new thing living in our home, and there was no going back.

I ceded nearly complete authority to my wife, then blamed both her and my son for my feelings of loss and insignificance. I took on every parental responsibility with sucked-up reluctance on the outside and contempt on the inside. My wife seemed to consider me selfish and irresponsible. She was tired, she’d say, of parenting both of us. Even when the bickering ended, the wounds never healed. Our marriage took a fatal hit.

I couldn’t mask my sadness when my work colleagues asked excitedly about fatherhood. “It’s good … well, it’s OK,” I said. “Actually, it’s very, very hard.” By then, I was close to tears. We were all happy when the conversation ended. Later on, they told me I’d scared the crap out of them. I’m sure at least a few went back on contraception.

One day, I sat on the hardwood floor next to my son, both of us exhausted. My son started crying. Then I did, too. Actually, we bawled. I don’t know why he was crying, but I was mourning the loss of my life as I knew it. As messy as it was, that shared sob was our first moment of bonding, and it helped steer me toward responsibility.

Eventually, my wife and I divorced, but our split actually enhanced my relationship with my kids. (We had twin girls after my son.) It forced me to locate my inner parent, the one who tells me when it’s OK to let my son stay up late, when it’s appropriate to be interrupted on the phone by a whining daughter and whether a tense situation calls for stern rules or just an all-out, friendly family wrestling match.

Nine years later, I look back at an old photo of my son and me asleep together on a sunlit bed when he was a newborn. Our faces are peaceful and our arms stretched upward, as if we’re doing a stadium wave. I view the picture as incontrovertible evidence that he was a part of me—a time-sucking, sleep-stealing, delicious part of me. And what’s more, he needed me. I just had to step outside of myself to see it. I was no less a dad all along, just a lost one.

Schwartzberg is a writer and PBS producer living in Montclair, N.J.

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Like I said, equal opportunity. It is kind of nice to hear men regreting they bought into the status of parenthood without questioning it. I’m not saying that men are stupid, since there appears to be an equal number of mothers who have made similar statements about being mothers (scroll down through previous posts). What did Joel really expect from fatherhood? A real-life imitation television ad spot for Pampers diapers? He must have. Yet as with new mothers, new fathers lose their life, too. Now they must create a life around their baby, who they have to take care of. “Our marriage took a fatal hit”, so so much for a baby cementing a relationship. lmao. Well, at least he is honest enough to admit about the divorce. I guess his wife did not have enough time for both Joel and the baby (so what else is new?). I can only conclude with the following: Poor Joel Schwartzberg, just like so many others, don’t know why they had children to begin with.  I can’t say for sure he was once a lost father, though. Maybe he was just looking in all the wrong places for love.

Normally I don’t read Parents but this article is much too significant to pass up. Read on:

http://www.parents.com/baby/new-parent/emotions/what-no-one-tells-you-about-early-motherhood/

What No One Tells You About Early Motherhood

By Denise Schipani

I adore my son. At 18 months old, he’s my boyfriend, my little bit on the side. What I feel for him sometimes borders on rapture, especially when we’re making each other laugh by rubbing noses, or when I nuzzle his neck — that secret chubby spot at the back that stays warm the longest after a nap. One flash of his grin, and I’m all aflutter. I’m in school again, writing his name over and over like a crush.

It was not always thus. Once the adrenaline rush of giving birth to Daniel faded, I set about Feeling Mother Love, and lo and behold, it didn’t happen. I didn’t love him. Truth be told, in those early weeks, I had to muster enough emotion to even like him.

My husband would come home and declare how he’d missed Daniel all day long. I looked at the boy and thought, “Him? You missed him?” I couldn’t fathom what there was to miss. He hadn’t done a thing all day, unless you count peeing in my face when I removed his diaper, or crying for three hours straight for no discernable reason.

Love him? Miss him? Bah, humbug. I was a Scrooge mom.

The Nitty-Gritty of Early Weeks

At six weeks, I took him with me to my ob-gyn’s office for my checkup. The way she and her nurse were oohing and ahhing over him (”He’s so cuddly!” “Look at those eyes!”) gave me pangs. My doctor, bless her, must have noticed the look of fear and panic in my eyes.

“This is the bottom, I promise,” she said. “This week, or next week maybe, he’ll smile and it’ll all be worthwhile.”

Now, what you might be expecting me to say here is that he did smile, and that I melted and never looked back. But that would be only partly right. I melted, but I always look back. I am determined to remember how I felt in those early weeks, to share with other women the nitty-gritty of how awful it was. Not because I enjoy being a purveyor of doom-and-gloom tales, but because I care enough to be honest.

Yes, I will say to anyone who will listen, there were days I wanted to pop my screaming baby out onto the fire escape and forget he ever existed. Yes, there were times I asked my husband, in all seriousness, whose brilliant idea it had been to have a baby (uh, mine).

What are we doing, as women, when we don’t tell each other the truth? Why do we gloss over it? It’s not possible that we fully forget. Is it some sort of benign neglect? Or is it the mothering instinct itself kicking in? Just as we want to shield our children from the scary monsters of the world, perhaps we also want to shield other women from the utter horror show that life with a newborn baby can be.

The Truth

So here goes, ladies. It is really, really bad. You do not sleep. You think you’re eating, but you’re really not (I would find half-consumed sandwiches hours after lunchtime, perched on the arm of the couch where they were abandoned during one disastrous nursing session or another).

Your husband offers to take over on the fourth hour of trying to soothe your crying baby, and you think you’ve let him until you realize that you’re still standing there, unable to lie down. You long, literally long, to do a normal task like paying a bill or folding a towel.

And the worst is in the middle of the night, when you’re rocking, rocking, rocking, and pacing, pacing, pacing, staring out the window at other quiet, dark houses and thinking, “Everyone out there is sleeping.” Those are the fire-escape moments.

When Daniel was just a few weeks old, we took him to a family party, and a young, childless woman, someone I don’t know very well, came up to me and asked me that loaded question: “So, how does it feel to be a mother?” I studied her closely. Did she really want to know? I almost said, “Oh, it’s just great.” The lie would have been so simple, so soothing to us both, and that may well be why it’s told so often. But I rallied. I didn’t tell the lie.

I said, “You know, I can’t really say. I just feel tired.” I puzzled the heck out of the poor girl, a newlywed who probably had quaint visions of motherhood in her head. Forget it, sister. It sucks. And then it gets better. And then it gets even better. Just ask my boyfriend.

Denise Schipani just had her second son. She lives in Huntington, New York.

Originally published in American Baby magazine, February 2005.

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It really is unfortunate that so many young mothers learn the hard way that babies are not glamorous and neither is motherhood glamorous. Denise should be given credit for her honesty about being a parent, of course, since far too many American women just mimic the “Being a parent is so marvy!” sales pitch. And mimic they do, without being fully honest with others, much less themselves. But hey, what would happen if women were honest about raising babies? Why, the human race would die out overnight. Not. Nothing like a little discouragement, which goes a very long way nowadays.

The only thing disturbing about this woman’s testimony is her opening statement: her now 18 month old baby is her “boyfriend.” Well, that is not something I would tell to the world in a magazine article don’t you know. Hopefully her husband won’t notice that part. If he did, he probably thinks he has been replaced with a baby. No wonder American men get pushed aside so easily and quickly. Thank God I’ll never have children. I would never be able to do that to my husband.

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/bestoftv/2009/05/07/lkl.bristol.palin.cnn?iref=videosearch

Bristol now claims that her statement on abstinence was taken out of context back in February 2009. Once again she manages to put her foot in her mouth, stating that abstinence is the only way to go for teens. While the lip service is not preventing teens from having sex (yet they must still be learning about the mechanics of sex somewhere if schools are reputedly teaching abstinence education), it always seems easier to speak abstinence than actually practice it.

Apparently abstinence did not work at all for poor Bristol. Teen pregnancy is still the highest in our nation in the western world. Teens are not doing too much to prevent pregnancy but of course that can be a challenge to do in our sex saturated culture. Birth control is not being taught in schools, which may prevent pregnancy, but not provide a foolproof way of preventing pregnancy, especially where condoms are concerned.

Levi has admitted that abstinence is unrealistic for teens since female teens seem to have the attitude that “I can’t get pregnant from having sex.” Guys still buy into the myth that withdrawal works, full insertion is not necessary for impregnation to occur, and so on. Girls think a Coca Cola flush will kill the sperm inside of them. So, why are the public schools not doing their jobs in dispelling these myths? Is it because that “abstinence education” does not include such information? This is most likely the reason.

Bristol Palin is of course the wrong person to be a spokeswoman on abstinence, since abstinence obviously did not work for her or Levi (it does make one wonder where this young couple were during the time abstinence did not work for them). Both Bristol and Levi failed in practicing abstinence, as do many other teens. The fact that both of these kids are fundamentalist Christians only throws a monkey wrench into the deal. Maybe they learned their abstinence sex ed from all of those “begats” the Old Testament is full of. Levi isn’t Bristol’s first love, either; an ex-boyfriend has admitted that the two of them used to fool around a bit at times.

At this point, Bristol Palin is better remembered for her statements on teenaged pregnancy not being glamorous, neither is having to take care of a baby at such a young age. Nothing is positive about teens reproducing, since the majority of them do not have the means to care for and support a baby.

http://news.aol.com/article/baby-thrown-from-car/463968

Baby Thrown Onto Highway, Killed

May 5, 2009

Richard Anthony McTear Jr., 21, was arrested after his ex-girlfriend’s baby was beaten, kidnapped and thrown from a car along an interstate in Tampa, Fla.

Authorities in Florida arrested a man suspected of assaulting and kidnapping an infant, and then discarding the child’s body along an interstate Tuesday.

Sheriff’s deputies were called to the home of a 17-year-old girl early Tuesday in Tampa, Fla. Jasmine Marie Bedwell told authorities that her ex-boyfriend showed up before dawn and attacked her and her infant son, throwing the boy onto concrete and then running off with him, according to the St. Petersburg Times.

The body of the infant, Emanuel Wesley Murray, was found along Interstate 275 in Tampa by a photographer for Fox 13, a local television station.

“On the side of the road, I saw something out of the corner of my eye and at first I thought it was a baby doll and then as I was thinking about it more, I thought that was awfully big for a doll,” photographer Jason Bird told Fox 13.

The baby was pronounced dead at 4:30 a.m, the Times said.

The suspect was arrested around 9 a.m. Police identified him as Richard Anthony McTear Jr., 21.

The newspaper reported that McTear has prior convictions for offenses including drug possession, resisting arrest, trespassing and felony battery. He was declared a fugitive earlier this year after his probation officers in the battery case were unable to locate him, the newspaper said.
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What is totally amazing here is that McTear’s ex-girlfriend actually went out with a criminal, but I suppose there are some girls who love bad boys. Well, McTear is a really bad boy in this case, tossing an infant from his car window while he was zooming up I 275. The baby is obviously not McTear’s - its name is Emanuel Wesley Murray, implying that his ex-girlfriend had a baby with another guy (What did McTear expect once they broke up? That she would never again hang out with boys? Wrong there!). Admittedly, the ex is way too young to be having babies, at the tender age of 17 (goodness, she is not even allowed to legally vote yet or buy lottery tickets) but at some point in her life, she hooked up with the wrong guy. Hopefully McTear will be away in jail for  along time and when he gets out, the ex-girlfriend will probably have to get police protection against McTear. The “good” news is that it is a good thing MctTear was not the father of little Emanuel but it is very well possible he might be a father to someone else’s baby. He was just upset enough with his ex Jasmine to assault her and take away her baby and kill him. McTear simply is not mature enough to be a father quite yet.

You cannot make this stuff up, you really can’t. Read on:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2009/04/30/national/a072801D42.DTL&feed=rss.business

Fla. boy flies to Calif. without telling parents

Thursday, April 30, 2009

April 30, 2009 Boca Raton, Fla. (AP) –

The parents of a 13-year-old South Florida boy are stunned he went unnoticed when he got on a plane to California.

Kenton Weaver took his father’s car Tuesday, drove 30 miles to the Fort Lauderdale airport and caught a flight to San Jose near where his mother lives.

The boy was found at a ticket counter at the California airport and taken to an uncle’s house. No word yet on whether the boy will return to Florida.

His parents say the teen has a form of autism and is fascinated with planes.

He used one of his father’s credit cards to buy the ticket, but had no ID on him. Airport and transportation officials say anyone under 18 only needs a boarding pass to get on a plane.
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He drove a car (he was lucky he did not get stopped by the police) to the airport, which is obvious, but so many questions remain: Where we his parents at the time he was doing this? Were they trying for another one? Furthermore, giving the length of time it takes to fly to Chicago and then San Jose - approximately six to seven hours - didn’t his parents even notice he was gone? Didn’t the father notice his car was gone? What about that credit card? Didn’t the father notice that was gone, too? The media has made Kenton’s parents look like idiots who need to give it a rest and take up a new hobby for a complete change, but what is even worse is the lax security at our airports. Apparently no one at O’Hare or the airport in Fort Lauderdale noticed this kid wandering around and hopping on board for a joy ride in the air. Oh and Dad Weaver, do yourself a huge favor and get the kid a model airplane kit if he is so fascinated with airplanes.