Celebrities are among the many new moms choosing to birth at home.

I admit I get a little giddy when I see homebirth in the news. Today Good Morning America featured an awesome video about Hollywood moms like Jennifer Connelly, Gisele Bundchen, and Alyson Hannigan taking part in the growing trend to have their babies at home rather than in the hospital. I’m not star struck, I’m just happy to see positive stories of moms birthing at home get good exposure. Continue reading »

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Early reports indicate that though tsunami damage was widespread, it could have been a lot worse.

Tsunami waves generated from a massive earthquake in Japan rocked that country’s east coast and killed hundreds before traveling at 500 miles per hour as they headed toward Hawaii and the western US seaboard. And as early reports begin to surface, two things are certain. Damage caused by the tsunamis was, indeed, extensive. But it also could have been a lot worse which is good news for a lot of bay areas.

Still, to people like retired mill worker and Crescent City resident Ted Scott, it must have seemed like deja vu all over again. Scott remembers all to well the 1964 tsunami that killed 17 on the west coast, 11 in Crescent City alone. “This is just devastating. I never thought I’d see this again,” he told ABC news.

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Many will be glued to their TVs today to get the latest on the the Japanese earthquake and the coming Tsunamis. And there is lot to see.

There is chilling video, stunning sad images and unsettling updates of what happened, and continues to happen as a result of the 8.9 earthquake and following tsunamis. In the wake of the quake there are Tsunami warnings from Hawaii, to Oregon to my home town of San Francisco.

Where are the best places to get these updates and news on the disaster and tsunami watch? Continue reading »

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photo credit : istockphoto.com

The Center for Disease Control, and Prevention released a startling and dramatic estimation for diabetes in adults by the year 2050. What is most startling about these numbers is who those adults will be – our children.

While the numbers do not specifically mention our children, we know by the year 2050 many of our children will be long gone out of our homes, grown up with possible families of their own. Continue reading »

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By now, I think we can all agree that breastfeeding is good. It is good for mothers. It is good for babies. It is even good for your bank account.

Still, some people feel uncomfortable when moms breastfeed in public.

All but three states have laws which specifically allow women to breastfeed in any public or private location where they have a right to be.

But the American people are still weirded out by public breastfeeding. According to a Babytalk Magazine, 57 percent of Americans disapprove of public breastfeeding and 72 percent oppose a depiction of breastfeeding on TV. When that magazine famously featured a photo of a mom breastfeeding on its cover, many readers were outraged.

Just a couple of days ago, a Florida mom staged a nurse-in at a school board meeting  protesting the fact that she was asked to stop nursing her 2-year-old in the lobby of her daughter’s elementary school. Continue reading »

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Do you complain about how you need to lose weight while your kids are within earshot? If so, you might consider holding your tongue after hearing what Babble Executive Editor Lori Leibovich and Dr. David Katz had to say about fostering healthy eating habits in kids yesterday on “ABC News Now.”

Parents need to be aware of the language they use when speaking about food. “We tend to forget that our kids are around when we’re complaining about the way we look,” Leibovich told ABC News. “All of those messages get filtered down to our kids. Even if we don’t think they’re listening, they hear it.”

In a recent poll of 500 moms, Babble found that 79% percent of them  haven’t yet talked to their kids about body image.

“It made us aware of the fact that there need to be more conversations about this. Parents are afraid of putting too much emphasis on food for fear of getting their children to focus on it too much,” Leibovich said. ”But they’re also afraid to not talk about it because everyone knows about the dramatic increase in childhood obesity.”

A stunning 10% of girls are “vulnerable” to eating disorders, according to Dr. Katz, who acknowledged that the real number is probably much higher than surveys  indicate.

The problem is that parents get conflicting messages about how to approach their kids’ eating. Michelle Obama’s recently-launched “anti-obesity” campaign urges parents to monitor their children’s diets. Meanwhile, eating disorder experts warn that controlling kids’ food intake can create an array of issues.

What to do? There are no easy answers, but for a start, you can check out Babble’s tips on how to encourage healthy attitudes about food.

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/adwriter/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/video/talk-kids-dieting-10621126&tab=9482930&section=4806329&playlist=4871226&page=1

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Marriage is not a perfect institution, what with all the shared space, divergent tastes and difficulty balancing life as an individual with life as the member of a unit.

Sometimes you make it work, sometimes you go out and sleep with a videographer, father a child, make a sex-tape and make plans for life after your wife dies — while said wife is still alive. Sometimes you promise Dave Matthews to the wrong person!

And when that happens, sometimes you split up. Legally separate, as it were. Like John and Elizabeth Edwards apparently (finally?) have. Continue reading »

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