A Boston-based TSA agent was charged with child rape, sparking concerns and criticism from privacy and passenger advocates who continue to be unhappy with the new full-body scanners in use at many airports.

Just who does the TSA have manning those scanners anyway?

While this guy’s arrest had nothing to do with his professional duties, its unnerving at best to think of a pedophile patting down my daughter as we enter an airplane. It’s certainly not a thought that make me feel more secure.

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I’ve always felt that the number one job of a parent, especially in the first dozen years or so of their lives, is to keep the kids alive.  We don’t let them play in the middle of the street, we make sure they wear helmets, and we don’t let them eat laundry detergent (much).  We teach them to blow on their soup, how to climb a tree safely, and perhaps even how to defend themselves if necessary.  Everything we do is part and parcel of taking care of our kids and keeping them safe and secure and parents — good parents, anyway — take that charge very seriously.  So why would any parent sit by and watch their child die?

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If you ask me, it would be bad enough spending six hours in a Walmart shopping, let alone sitting in a back room with a couple of obstinate security officers.  That’s what happened to 14-year-old Sydney Robinson and a friend after the security guards at a Canadian Walmart accused Sydney of stealing a $1 pack of gum.  They took Sydney and her friend into their custody to await arrival of police — who were unusually busy after the killing of a constable that day.  So Sydney and her friend sat there for six hours, without food or water, while her parents, Scott and Diane Robinson, took turns staying with them.

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Let me say that I make a conscious effort to eschew violence as much as possible — just as some ex-smokers are almost rabid in their condemnation of smoking, so too am I perhaps overly anti-violence.  That said, I think that, had I been in Nic’s shoes, there would have been blood spilled at the Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson airport the other day.  Certainly, the possibly-perverted old man who took her son Jackson away from her and out of her sight to “inspect” him would have been, shall we say, damaged.
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Having done this parenting blogger gig for awhile, the old “babies switched at birth” story starts to get a little old-hat. But I always find them fascinating, including this latest one: A mother in North Dakota left Mercy Medical Center in Williston with the wrong baby, only to have the mistake discovered shortly thereafter.

The hospital isn’t talking about what the heck happened here – understandably, they want to mimize their lawsuit exposure, but they are reviewing their procedures for discharge after the event. Continue reading »

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I worked from home part-time for the first six years of my son’s life.
I was very lucky in many ways to have this option as it meant I didn’t miss a single step, a tooth, a word. I was there for everything. But all the while, I have to say I felt a level of anxiety about the fact that I wasn’t paying into a pension, my income was a mere fraction of my husband’s and I was acutely aware of my financial dependence on him.
When I started working full-time outside of the home a year ago, I felt a huge sense of relief. I’m now making enough money to support myself and my son if I ever needed to, I’m paying into a pension and I feel like I’m a whole lot safer financially.
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