Best of Strollerderby October 31, 2009

Cheap Ass Halloween Costumes to Make Your Children Sad

School Administrator Accused of Taping Student’s Mouth

Facebook Post Gets Student Suspended

Toddler Denied Insurance For Being Too Small

How to Date a Disney Princess

Overinvolved Parents Charged With Child Abuse

Insurance Company Tells Woman to Get Sterilized

Is It Fair to Call a Forced C-Section Rape?

Halloween Candy Rots Your Teeth — More Or Less

Not all candy is created equal.  Duh.  Baby Ruth is way better than Snickers or Milky Way and those little sticks from Lik-M-Aid Fun Dip (forget the sugar powder) are awesome.  But that’s not what dentists care about.  In fact, Dr. Douglas Young, professor of dental practice at the University of the Pacific, Arthur A. Dugoni School of Dentistry rates his candy based on the damage it can do to your teeth.  Now, normally, I wouldn’t pay attention to this sort of thing, but since taking kids to the dentist is about as much fun as going myself, I thought this might be some good advice to keep in mind.
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Halloween at the Cyrus House: Totally Creepy

I’m well aware that the inappropriate sexualization of the Cyrus sisters is old news by now, but I just can’t stop being horrified by it.

Miley’s little sister Noah recently attended a fund-raising Halloween gala in a costume that would be scandalous for a thirty-year-old married woman. Noah is nine.

Unfortunately, the photo to the right is just the grade schooler in her usual get-up, which is far less disturbing than her vampire (I think?) costume, which is below. Continue reading »

Best of FameCrawler - Week of October 31st

Kelly Rutherford, Matthew Settle and Their Gossip Girls

Hugh Jackman Manages To Have Date Nights

Sarah Palin Goes Off on Levi!

Giada de Laurentiis - Dinner For One?

Blossom Lets Her Kids P»oop On The Floor

Gilles Marini - Dancing Dad Poses for Playboy (PHOTOS)

Real Housewives of Atlanta Star Pregnant with Late Lover’s Baby?

Kate Gosselin Talks About The “Eight Is Too Much” Wig

Spencer Pratt Should Never Have Children

Will Elisabeth Hasselbeck Have Any More Kids?

It’s Another Girl For Mark Wahlberg

Pete Wentz Is A Multi-Tasker

Schools Take the Scary Out of Halloween Costumes

Last night we took our kids to a trick-or-treat event at a nearby historical village.  Riding with other similarly dressed little girls (read: princesses) on an ancient amusement ride under a red light while watching witches, monsters, and football players running by us in the dark, I was struck by what a magical holiday Halloween is for kids.

Magical, yes, but often scary, too.  There were a lot of princesses and superheros there last night, but there were also costumes that made my kids cringe and hide behind my legs, too.

In the last few years, schools have been making a real effort to include Halloween fun in the curriculum, while at the same time asking parents to limit the blood and gore.
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Toddler Has Twin Removed from Stomach

It might be Halloween, but this is no Hollywood horror movie plot.  A Chinese toddler recently had surgery to remove her own twin — still growing — from her belly.

At 18 months old Kang Mengru was a normal toddler, normal except for a swollen abdomen that made her the laughing stock of the village and gave her the look of being pregnant, her foster parents told the Telegraph.

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They Say: Maybe a Little Screen Time is Not So Bad

It seems that the recent refund offer by Disney was the spark that reignited the flame of a decades-old controversy:   Is television harmful to tots?   Are we a society of lazy, selfish parents that use the screen as a live-in babysitter?  And if so, are we creating a society of mush-brained mutants that call the remote “Daddy”?

Julia Pimsleur Levine, mother of 2 and creator of Little Pim, an educational foreign-language DVD series for the toddler set, has weighed in with the following letter:

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How Old is Too Old for Trick or Treating?

The last year I went trick or treating, I was in middle school. My best friend and I had decided it was time to be distributing candy, not raking it in, and planned to spend the night manning her front porch. But after about twenty minutes, we found that asking little ghosts and witches what they were for Halloween was just not the same as roaming the crowded streets ourselves, all decked out and high on sugar. Continue reading »

Be Warned About Baby’s Leaps

How often have you watched your baby’s sleep go right down the tubes for no apparent reason, worry that you have irreparably screwed up, only to see her go through an enormous developmental leap and settle down immediately thereafter? Yeah, me too, too many times to count.

There’s a book called The Wonder Weeks which I haven’t read, but people I majorly respect cite it frequently as a clue to why babies periodically seem to lose their little minds. It delineates exactly when developmental leaps happen, and why they cause such upheaval in for babies — and their parents. Now, the authors of the book Continue reading »

Keep The Swine Flu Away This Halloween

Although the swine flu may very well be a popular costume this year, that’s the only kind you want to let in your door.  To help prevent the other kind — the contagious, potentially serious kind — from replacing tummyaches as the aftermath of Halloween trick-or-treating, experts are offering some tips for staying safe and healthy this year.  Naturally, if you or your kids are not feeling well, you probably want to stay home and not pass out candy — you don’t want to pass out germs along with the goodies.

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