Pendragons Princess

Or triplets. File this under “Having children for all of the wrong reasons”:

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/2741085/Mum-of-13-I-wont-stop

-until-Ive-had-twins.html

Mum of 13: I won’t stop until I’ve had twins

November 22, 2009

A MUM-OF-13 who costs taxpayers £50,000 a YEAR has said she won’t stop having kids until she gives birth to twins.

Baby machine Sara Foss, 39, is due to give birth to her 14TH child in April but will try to get pregnant again as soon as possible to realise her dream.

The brazen mum said today: “All I’ve ever wanted is twins or triplets. It’s my biggest wish, and I’m going to keep trying until I do it.

“It would be fantastic. In fact, I won’t stop trying until I’ve done it. I love having babies - it’s the most wonderful thing in the world.”

Allowance

Sara was 16 when she had her first baby, Patrick, in 1986 - but, traumatised by giving birth, she vowed not to have any more children.

It was a decade before she changed her mind and had a second son, Stephen - and she has almost averaged a birth a YEAR ever since.

She said: “I got over my fear of labour and just started having kids. They’re all brilliant. They don’t give me any bother. They’re fantastic.”

Her mammoth brood now comprises Patrick, 23, Stephen, 13, Malachai, 12, Peppermint, 11, Echo, 10, Eli, nine, Rogue, eight, Frodo, seven, Morpheus, five, Artemis, four, Blackbird, three, Baudelaire, two, and nine-month-old Voorhees.

All bar Patrick share a three-bedroom council house with their mother and father, Sara’s long-term partner Stephen Smith, 40.

Even though Stephen works as a canal boat builder, the couple receive £4,200 in tax credits and family allowance every month.

Yet Sara, who has just run up a £5,000 bill buying her children’s Christmas gifts at Toys R Us, claims they have to watch every penny.

She insisted: “I had been saving up all year so that we would have enough money to get all the presents. It was really hard work.

“We were in the shop for hours. Stephen had to do several trips home to take back what we had bought. I had blisters afterwards.”

Each week the family forks out around £600 on groceries - including 32 loaves of bread, 75lb of potatoes and 126 pints of milk.

They also buy 36 rolls of toilet paper, three boxes of washing powder and eight boxes of cereal during their regular supermarket shop.

The annual school uniform bill is £2,000, and their holiday at Butlin’s costs even more - mainly because they have to hire a minibus.

Sara, of Derby, begins her chores at 4am every morning and keeps the house spotlessly clean to avoid being tagged a layabout scrounger.

She said: “If people saw us living in a pigsty they would say that we were a scrounging, low-life family who begged from the State.

“They would say I was a slapper for having so many children and that I couldn’t even be bothered to keep the house looking nice.

“And that’s so not true. Even when I’m straight I can’t put my feet up. I’ve been known to take down curtains at midnight and wash them.”

She added: “We have a lot of bunkbeds and cots. All the furniture in the bedrooms is on wheels so that we can move it at bedtime.

“Baudelaire sleeps in a travel cot, and a couple of the lads use an airbed. It’s a squash and a squeeze, but it’s cosy. It’s home.”

Now 20 weeks’ pregnant with baby number 14, Sara is preparing to welcome the clan’s latest arrival - and already planning for more.

She said: “I wanted two - that’s the disappointing part of this pregnancy. But there’s always next time. I’m going to keep trying, that’s for sure.”
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Converted to American dollars, £50,000 comes to about $82,000.00 a year. That is indeed an obscene amount when you consider Sara Foss is a social parasite in the UK. That sort of thing would never be tolerated here. This is just one more reason the Labour Party is becoming more and more unpopular in the UK. It is not bad enough when a woman like Foss lusts for twins as she has lusted to have all of those other children. She clearly makes babies just to get extra welfare checks a month even though her partner Stephen works. It is a shame he does not have the backbone to say “No more babies to her.” Maybe the UK can legislate a law mandating women to get sterilized. Babies are one thing no women “needs.”

IMHO it’s gone too far five years ago, but read on:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/janice_turner/article6916343.ece

November 14, 2009

Worship of children has gone too far

Since when did raising a child elevate you to a state of grace with big benefits attached?

Janice Turner

At 86 my parents don’t get out much, but once a week they like to have lunch at the café of their local supermarket. Since both now walk with a stick — my ma is registered disabled, my dad recovering from a stroke — they need to park close to the store.

But this week the disabled places were all full so they took the nearest one, a parent-and-child bay. Later they returned to their car to find a note pinned to the windscreen.

“This is not a disabled space,” it said. “This is for parents, you stupid old bastards.” So, it appears that some young and able-bodied mother or father — the note, of course, was anonymous — thought that their own inconvenience in having to walk small children a few yards farther across a car park took precedence over the needs of the elderly couple they had clearly observed struggling inside. And they were so enraged by this injustice that they took out a Biro and penned words calculated to scare or shame them into line.

The note-writer is ignorant as well as cruel: a Blue Badge holder has the right to park in any space — even on yellow lines — by law. Parent-and- child parking is just a gimmick, a marketing wheeze: families, with their megapacks of Pampers and Frubes, their £100-plus weekly shops, are customers worth cultivating. And while, a decade ago, when I had babies myself, I appreciated the extra room to open doors wide and fiddle fat-fingeredly with pesky car-seat buckles, I saw those spaces as a courtesy, not a right.

When did parents grow so entitled? Obviously this note-writer is at the farthest end of the spectrum. But in recent years there has been a burgeoning belief that to raise a child elevates you to a state of grace, precludes any accusations of selfishness — since motherhood is one, long selfless sacrifice — and the world must listen up to your shrill, me-first demands, however egregious.

This week, a London mother, Lisa Smith, was ordered off a 139 bus because her pushchair was too large to fit into the space reserved for buggies and the driver believed that it was blocking the doors. “He actually wanted me to take my child out into the pouring rain and walk,” she said aghast, as if 19-month-old Oliver dissolves like bath salts when damp. But why, a legion of women were wondering, didn’t Ms Smith do what bus-going mums have always done and fold the bloody buggy?

A decade ago we had no choice. Extract wriggling boy, clutch shopping bags in one hand, wrestle pram’s cussed mechanism with other, catapult across aisle when bus took off. There was no buggy area on buses. Or, rather, no space designated for wheelchairs, since that was London Transport’s primary intent. Now folding a buggy, even to admit a disabled passenger, is treated as an outrageous inconvenience, accompanied by glares and harrumphing.

That Ms Smith’s buggy was too humungous even to fit in that space was telling. Pushchairs have expanded like obese toddlers over the years. Those £400 celeb-endorsed off-roaders with the fat-boy wheels are as long and low-lying as Formula One racers, able to traverse the Serengeti but not squeeze on to packed Tube trains. Many fancier pushchairs are now so unwieldy that they aren’t much smaller when collapsed.

Designers deduce that parents feel entitled to dominate public space and to assume that crowds of commuters will part in awe at the early morning entrance of the Quinny Zap bearing His Majesty the Baby. Indeed, on public transport you witness a reversal of the natural order. Children were once taught to stand up for older folks or at least squeeze two to a seat, the littlest on a lap. Now you see a great lunking line of kids smugly filling a carriage, their own parents standing like stoic pack animals carrying everyone’s coats. I see mothers relegated to the back seats of their own cars, surrendering all hope of adult conversation or control of the radio, so that a seven-year-old can ride up front with Dad.

Little wonder then, if adults feel obliged to deliver ludicrous, super-luxe levels of comfort and care for their children, that they start to regard parenthood as akin to a disability. From Gordon’s “hard-working families” to media mummies penning tear-stained farewells to careers that they can’t combine with caring for one small baby, we never stop hearing how near impossible it is to raise a child.

Yet if you are Western woman, blessed with a healthy baby — and not a single mum trapped in a broken-lifted council flat — motherhood has never been a bigger doddle. The gadgets, the gazillion cartoon channels, a whole internet bubbling with advice and affirmation, the airlines with their early boarding and kiddy pencil sets, the fathers who look after their kids more than any men yet born. A family-friendly faith is universally preached: you can breast-feed in church, let your toddler eat at The Ivy, take your Year 6 son to a White Stripes gig, change a nappy on a pub table at midnight and few would dare to suggest that this is not the right place.

And whatever government is in power next year, the centrality of families in public policy will not change. Long gone are the Eighties Tory grandees who laughed at Harriet Harman for suggesting that afterschool clubs were the State’s concern. Flexi-working, extended maternity leave, paternity rights — political shifts that have enhanced millions of lives — will not be scrapped under David Cameron. Or Downing Street would be blockaded by Bugaboos. The outcry over the Government’s plans to cut the childcare vouchers scheme that rewards parents earning more than £42,000 a year shows how even middle-income families believe that they should be subsidised by the (possibly poorer) childless.

Yet, for all these gains, do parents ever express gratitude or grace? Instead, their dissatisfaction fed by the family-feeding companies flogging them bigger people carriers, flashier prams, they lament only what they lack.

So your baby woke you at dawn, you’ve gained a stone, you’re short on sex or fun or “me time”. Shuffle the playlist, sister. It will pass, all of it, quicker than you think. And the decades will dissolve until you too are struggling across a supermarket car park, barged aside by pious pram-pushers, and wondering how it came to be that caring for your own progeny comes with a free pass not to give a damn about anyone else.

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I find this totally disgusting: the article writer’s parents needed a parking spot close to the store because they were disabled, and they come out to find a nasty note on their car condemning them for parking in a spot meant for entitled young parents. Hello! Parents need to exercise off the fat from having a baby. Disabled people have limited mobility. What the hell is wrong with people nowadays? It’s not her parent’s fault there were no more available handicapped parking spaces.

I think it is high time to do away with child/parent and so-called “expecting” parking spaces, everywhere. Women who are pregnant, and have young children, are NOT disabled. It won’t kill them to walk a few more feet in a regular parking spot. Who the hell do they think they are, dictating to how the world should treat them? They are not better than childfree people, handicapped people, or anyone else. These people made a choice to get pregnant (presumedly because they do not know how to use birth control in any shape or form) and have a baby (or should I say sex trophy?). All these entitlements minded mothers do is whine, bitch, and whine some more about how haaaaard it is being a mother. They made their bed, now they must lie in it.

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?’”

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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.

http://www.clickorlando.com/education/20568523/detail.html?

dsq=15457428#comment-15457428

Dad Takes Son To School In Helicopter
Landing At Clermont High School Under Investigation

POSTED: Wednesday, August 26, 2009

CLERMONT, Fla. — An investigation has been launched after a man took his son to his first day of high school in a helicopter and landed the chopper on the Clermont campus without permission.

Bart Southern, who rented the blue and white Hughes 300 helicopter from Air Orlando, said he flew his son to East Ridge High School “to make a positive impression on the other students,” according to a Lake County sheriff’s report.

Two deputies spotted the helicopter at about 7 a.m. Monday and soon thereafter received calls from school officials about the helicopter, which landed behind some portables on the east side of campus, the report said.

It’s not known how many students witnessed the landing.

The school principal, David Cunningham, requested that an investigation be launched to find out if there was an emergency. Deputies contacted the FAA, which said the chopper had been rented by Southern.

According to the Lake County sheriff’s report, Southern admitted that he landed the helicopter on the campus.

Cunningham said he would “forward the information though his chain of command,” the report stated.

Watch Local 6 News for more on this story.

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What exactly was the purpose of Southern dropping off his son in a helicopter for? He clearly did not have permission to land the helicopter on school grounds, even if he owned the helicopter. Perhaps Southern was busy trying to be a big buddy to his little buddy (Yo, Gilligan!) in getting him to school on he first day. One can only wonder how his son’s peers will treat him now - like the snob he and his father is? No, it would be wrong to blame a teenaged boy for the stupid actions of his father. Chances are Southern would say something like: “But my son insisted I bring him to school this way!” while the father is busy projecting his fantasies onto his unassuming teenaged son. It just goes to show you how desperate some parents are in wanting to live their childhood all over again through their offspring.

I think they just hate the potential danger some parents put their child in:

http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1917878,00.html

Why Does Facebook Hate Babies?
by Joel Stein, August 21, 2009

Facebook hates babies. I found this out last night when I logged on as Laszlo Stein, my three-month old son who has been faithfully posting adorable photos and angry commentary since his second-trimester sonogram, back when his listed interests were just kicking and drinking his own urine. In his time on Facebook, he threatened to pee on some, cut others and once posted — next to a photo of him gummily smiling and wearing a kimono — this response to my wife’s friend Nancy’s comment that she met another baby named Laszlo: “OMG! That’s so awesome! We should form a Facebook group! Just kidding. I don’t give a crap, you loser. Get a life.” More than once, he commented on the photo of another baby with “I’d hit that.”
But last night when I logged in, all I got was a page that said, “Account disabled.” Now, I know Facebook has a rule that you have to be over 13, and I guess some loser at Facebook is paid to look around for accounts with photos of people under 13. I’m sure Facebook does this to protect kids from pedophiles, and yet the surest way for a pedophile to find a kid would be to get a job at Facebook looking for kids’ accounts. (Read “Does Facebook Replace Face Time or Enhance It?”)

All I wanted was to avoid being one of those annoying parents who post photos of their kids on their own page. I wanted a place for the few family and friends who want to see his baby pictures. And now all the photos other people posted of Laszlo are gone, and I have to e-mail every damn photo to our parents and siblings. I wish Facebook had given me some kind of warning so I could have archived all this stuff or transferred it to the Facebook application Baby Book, which I found out about too late and is oddly O.K. with Facebook even though it’s exactly the same as Laszlo having his own page.

You can still do right, Facebook, by giving me back his page for a day so I can transfer it, and no longer be known as a baby hater. You know how to contact me. On Facebook.
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“Ohhh wheeee! Look at my baby! Isn’t he so kayouuuutee!” Well, what other possible reason would someone have for plastering their child’s photo on Facebook? Do they really think the rest of the world will be obsessed with their child? I didn’t think so. Well, the pedophiles might, but they are an exception. But you know how big some people are about fambly. Facebook should be for, and remain for, adults, not crotchdumps. Forget about fambly, too - if you want a site for that, make your own website. Even I don’t plaster photos of myself and husband all over the Internet. That’s an invasion of privacy. But I guess the whining parents have to whine about something.

I used to see parents at the mall have their toddlers run around barefoot with no socks or shoes on. Not too bright, admittedly, since the child could accidentally step on something sharp. So I can perfectly understand Burger King’s move here:

http://www.fox2now.com/ktvi-baby-no-shoes-kickedout-restaurant-080409,0,5070606.story

Restaurant Threatens To Kick Out Baby Not Wearing Shoes

By Andy Banker

August 4, 2009

SUNSET HILLS, MO (KTVI - FOX2now.com) - No shoes, no shirt, no service: there is word that the manager of a St. Louis County restaurant threatened to kick out a six-month old baby and her mother because the baby wasn’t wearing shoes. The infant’s mom says the restaurant is taking the policy too far. Jennifer Frederich said the manager of the Sunset Hills Burger King at 10734 Sunset Hills Plaza cited ‘health concerns’.

Frederich said her daughter, Kaylin, was too young to even get her feet dirty; she couldn’t walk, couldn’t crawl, her feet still pretty much too small for shoes.

“Everybody loves baby feet,” she said.

Yet she said those feet nearly got the baby, her mom and her grandmother, booted from the restaurant, as grandma was holding Kaylin at the counter and the cashier took their order.

“The manager was standing next to him said, ‘you can order “to go” but you’re going to have to leave if she doesn’t have shoes on’. He said, ‘it’s against health code’,” Frederich said.

Frederich said she was taking her church youth group to the Rock the River concerts under the Gateway Arch, Sunday; she, her mother, daughter, and about 25 others, stopped at the Burger King on the way; Frederich’s mother went in with the baby first; then Frederich came in with the rest of the group.

“The guy was still saying, ‘that lady is still here with that baby without shoes’,” Frederich said. “I just looked at him and I said, ‘that’s my daughter. She doesn’t own shoes. She’s only 6 months old’… she doesn’t walk. She’s not touching the ground. So there’s no reason for her to have shoes on.”

Still, a sign on the door did say, “shoes and shirt required”. So, Frederich said she put socks on the baby in an effort to comply; but the manager threatened to call police, so the group ate hurriedly and left.

“It’s been an absolute hysteria on Facebook,” she said. “People just think it’s so funny.”

She posted her story on the social networking website and had gotten dozen of responses by Tuesday; ranging from “are you kidding me?” — to — “that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard”.

She said she felt obligated to spread the word about the policy.

“People had to know about this…if you’re going to go to Burger King get some shoes on your baby or go somewhere else,” she said. “I think they [Burger King manageers] just need to understand, it’s a baby. They’re not going to be walking around in their dirty, nasty, feet. I feel like the policy was probably for grown adults who might walk in without shoes on. That’s understandable. But, baby’s don’t wear shoes.”

The restaurant’s management referred FOX 2 to Burger King’s corporate office for comment on the incident. After repeated calls, FOX 2 had yet to get a response Tuesday night.

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So, will the child be in the habit of not wearing shoes until it reaches the age of 5 or 6? It’s not as if baby shoes are not made anymore. Heck, even I still have my baby shoes, although they have been bronzed. The laziness of some parents. But I guess it is much more important for that attachment parenting to take place rather than common sense. I mean, it’s just a bayybeee.

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.

http://www.statesman.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/courts/entries/2009/04/07/dead_mans_sperm_to_be_taken_by.html

Dead man’s sperm to be taken by court order

by Tony Plohetski

Tuesday, April 7, 2009, 02:38 PM

A Travis County judge has signed an order today requiring the medical examiner’s office to preserve the body of an assault victim until his sperm can be taken and make the body available to an expert trained in collecting such specimens.

Probate Judge Guy Herman signed the temporary restraining order and mandatory injunction at 3 p.m. at the request of Marissa Evans, whose son died Sunday. Nikolas Colton Evans, 20, shown at right, was assaulted on East Sixth Street on March 27 and remained at the University Medical Center at Brackenridge until his death.

Marissa Evans, 42, said in a court affidavit and an interview today that she wants to use the sperm to have a grandchild through a surrogate mother.

“I want him to live on,” Evans said. “I want to keep a piece of him.”

Evans said in the affidavit that her son had told her that he wanted to have three children and had already chosen their names: Hunter, Tod and Van.

According to court documents and Marissa Evans, she repeatedly asked hospital officials and representatives from an organ donation agency to extract her son’s sperm leading up to and immediately after his death. They declined, she said.

The documents said that the sperm must be collected within 24 hours of Evans’ death for it to remain viable or that his body must be cooled to no more than 4 degrees centigrade. Evans agreed to donate her son’s organs, which required him to be on life support until 9 p.m. Monday, documents said.

Police have said Evans was leaving a bar on Sixth Street with a friend about 2 a.m. on March 27 when they got into an argument with several men.

After that argument, police say another group approached Evans and his friend and that one of the men in that group hit both of them. Evans hit his head on the ground after he was punched, police said.

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Just when you thought that breeders could not get any worse - but this plainly perverse. The mother wants a grandchild (GREEDY) and she loves her son so much she wants to preserve his sperm for just this purpose. These people do not “need” grandchildren, they need professional psychiatric help. It isn’t bad enough her son died in an assault attack. Legal motions like that make me question just how much these parents really love their children (most of them do not since they just lust for a child). Apparently they don’t. And what’s with the so-called “obligation” of Evans to her son’s lustful wishes? Three kids? Three non-existent kids with their names already picked out? What sort of an accomplishment is that?The organ donation is a better accomplishment, because creating more starving mouths isn’t.

http://i.gizmodo.com/5191510/peekaru-is-a-baby-snuggie

Just when you thought the front harnesses were not creepy enough. Along comes the Peekaru which makes the baby looks like it is still attatched to its mommy:

Personally, I prefer this guy below:

No, he is not wearing a Renaissance style Peekaru, that is actually a parasite attatched to its middle. But it runs on the same principle, you see. The creators of Peekaru saw a photo of this guy in an old medical curiosity book and figured it would be cool to make something similar for infants. Yes, the baby inside will have its stinky diaper full while Mommy has to carry the thing around. Repulsive, certainly, Disgusting, no question about it. Well, it’s just another dark sign of our baby infatuated society. Personally, I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing a Peekaru and since I will never have any children, there is nothing to worry about. By the way, for those wondering who that guy is in the illustration, that is Harry. His parasite is named George. Well, those with parasites sure do tend to stick together.