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Strollerderby
Whiter whites AND free of anthrax!
All that laundry piled up in the corner? Sorry, you’re going to have to do it despite today’s anthrax scare.
The white powder in your Tide box — or little sample bag? It’s soap, maybe a little stain fighter. But it’s most definitely not anthrax.
About.com’s Urban Legends guru, David Emery, debunks the story that had been circulating the internet. Continue reading »
Times are tough and we are all looking for ways to stretch our budgets these days. Of course, the best way to make ends meet is to make more money, right? But for a stay-at-home mom who isn’t a best-selling author, the opportunities for bringing in some extra cash can be rather limited. Trying to find a flexible, part-time job that fits around the kid’s schedule can be tough. There’s babysitting. There’s housecleaning. And then there’s phone sex operator.
Actually, the preferred term is phone actor and according to Staffcentrix, a company that helps people find work-at-home-jobs, more and more moms are finding it to be the answer to their financial prayers. Continue reading »
This week on CNN, Anderson Cooper and Soledad O’Brien are co-presenting a series called Black or White: Kids on Race. According to their admittedly unscientific pilot study at the heart of the piece, “white children have an overwhelming white bias, and black children also have a bias toward white.” University of Chicago professor Margaret Beale Spencer, who designed the study, says that white bias is not as strong among black children as it is among white children.
The study is basically a recreation of the famous “Doll Test” of the 1940′s. The results of that test were used to argue for desegregation of schools in Brown v. Board of Education. In the modern version, students ages 4-10 at four schools in New York City and four schools in Georgia were asked to point to “one of five cartoon pictures that varied in skin color from light to dark” in response to commands such as, “Show me the dumb child.” Despite the fact that all the cartoon faces were smiling and dressed in the same blue outfit, children more frequently identified the darker-skinned cartoons as having negative characteristics. (The cartoon characters were all girls, by the way. I wonder if the study results might have changed if the characters were all boys or children of both sexes and/or characters showing different emotions/attitudes.) Continue reading »
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there were 10.4 million single mother families in the U.S. in 2006. Are many of those mothers unwittingly raising their daughters to be single, too?
That’s the question Audrey Irvine asks in an essay at CNN. A single black woman raised by a widowed mother, Irvine believes there may be more behind her own status than a dearth of available men. Continue reading »
Pregnant 40- to 44 year-olds are at a greater risk for complications like pre-eclampsia, gestational diabetes, miscarriage and children with chromosomal disorders. Yet these so-called older moms are giving birth at ever so slightly higher rates every year.
Between 2o07 and 2008, births for women over 40 increased 4 percent, while births for women under 40 decreased 3 percent.
Just how scary is it to get pregnant after 40? Well, the numbers don’t look good. But they’re also not a condemnation. Continue reading »
The public was shouting “hoax” shortly after the balloon hit the ground, and his own son confirmed that they “did it for the show” on national TV.
But even after pleading guilty to a felony count of attempting to influence a public servant, Balloon Boy dad Richard Heene told Larry King Live that he never intentionally deceived the public. He really believed that his six-year-old son, Falcon, was floating away in that balloon.
In addition to feeling really emotional, I’ve also felt pretty icky watching videos of soldiers returning home to the considerable surprise of their children. It’s kind of a private moment, and yet there I am, along with 3 million of my closest friends, clicking on the link while I drink my morning coffee.
You know how they go: Dad, who has been away in Afghanistan or Iraq, returns home earlier than the child expected. Rather than wait until the child is home, the dad — and someone holding a camera — show up at school/the corner bakery/a football game/as Santa.
Child sits stunned for a moment, then runs to dad. Kid cries. Dad cries. Camera-holder cries. We all cry. Video gets uploaded. CNN runs it round the clock. More tears.
It’s almost fun, like a movie. But, ew. That’s a real kid … whose real dad was away at war. Then Dad suddenly appeared out of nowhere. Doesn’t that mess with their minds even a little bit? Continue reading »
Lori Garcia 
Joslyn Gray 
Amber Doty 
Julianna Miner 
Monica Bielanko 
Sierra Black 
Meredith Carroll 
Carolyn Castiglia 
Sunny Chanel 
Madeline Holler 
Rebecca Odes 
Danielle Smith 
Danielle Sullivan 
Katherine Stone 
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