Does Having Multiples Equal Misery?

The media has a love affair with high order multiples. Is it no wonder? They are, after all, rare and unusual.


Two famous examples are Jon and Kate Gosselin and We TV's Raising Sextuplets Bryan and Jenny Masche. There are a lot of similarities between the two couples. TV Guide calls the Masches "[Jon and Kate] the pre-train wreck years" but you can tell the train wreck is coming.

Both families are headed by strong willed woman who have immature slobs for husbands. The Gosselins ended up divorcing and it seems like the Masches are headed in that direction. They argue all the time.

Having that many children definitely puts a stress on a marriage. These poor couples never have any alone time, expect when the children are asleep and even then they have to use that time to do chores or go to their job. They survive on little sleep and little peace and quiet. Their marriage is put on the back burner, if it's on a burner at all.

A few months ago, a special aired on a couple who had quintuplets along with an older child. Their marriage was pretty solid, but they were having serious financial troubles. They had unpaid medical bills in the hundreds of thousands. They were a month or two away from having their house foreclosed on and they weren't able to buy their kids Christmas gifts that year. The stress level of the father, the sole provider, was high.

As if the toll having high order multiples takes on marriage and on finances wasn't enough, there's the toll it takes on the mother's body. Pregnancy and delivery are dangerous. Her abdominal muscles don't go back into place after she give birth. She has excess skin, hernias and bladder issues. All these things can only be fixed with surgery, which means weeks of recovery.

Having a number of children at once poses challenges the rest of us can only imagine and none of us envy.

I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant, the Series

Most years, during the summer months, cable TV stations showed a variety of interesting summer series. Not this year. Interesting shows are few and far between. This is how I came to watch a show on TLC last week called I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant. The show, which also airs on Discovery Health, is in its second season.

How does a show like this make it on the air in the first place? Are there really that many women who have no idea they are pregnant, enough for two seasons of a television show?

For those of you who aren't familiar with the show, it shows re-enactments of women who went to the ER with mysterious and extremely painful abdominal pains only to discover at the hospital that they are in labor and about to give birth. The women are also interviewed between segments.

In the last interview of the show, almost all of the women say that in hindsight they did have symptoms and they ignored them or dismissed them as something else. This tells me these women don't know their own bodies very well. When I was pregnant, I knew before ever taking a pregnancy test. I knew because I was experiencing symptoms my body had never experienced before and hasn't since. I knew it wasn't PMS or stress. It was different than anything I had previously experienced and I knew this.

There are some other things I don't understand. How could a woman not feel the baby kicking? Most of us complain about being kept up at night or being able to see our stomachs move. Some others will actually see a foot pressing against their skin. How could she not feel that her breathing has changed as the baby or that she is going to the bathroom more often as the baby presses on her internal organs? How could she thinking gaining 20 pounds within a short time frame is normal, especially when all of it is in one central area, her stomach?

As I said before, are there really enough women who didn't know they were pregnant for there to be two seasons of this show? How many woman fall into this category?

Earthquake Hits Southern Canada

Did you feel the earthquake on Wednesday? That's when a 5.0 earthquake hit near the Ontario/Quebec border. It was felt hundreds of miles away.


Near the epicenter there was damage. Further away buildings swayed. I felt it. Although, where I live it was more like a gentle sway. I was sitting at the computer and felt the chair move. I didn't know whether it was my imagination or whether I was slightly dizzy or whether my daughter was behind me moving the chair. But then it stopped and I didn't think anything about until hours later.

People who live in Southern California and in other areas are used to earthquakes. A 5.0 would barely make the news there. But here in the East and Midwest, quakes are less common. The last 5.0 to hit the area was in 1986. I was at school and it was during lunchtime, but the lunchroom was in the lower level of the school and I never felt it. Both my parents and my grandparents had the floors of their garages crack as did the brick on the side of my grandparents' house.

As strange as it may sound I'm glad I lived through this earthquake and felt it, even if barely. It's an experience that might not come around again for another 24 years.

We All Need More Me Time

Since becoming a parent you have little or no "me time". This is especially true if your children are still very young. You've made a lot of sacrifices.


Lately, I've been giving this a lot of thought. Some of my interests have changed over the years and I found myself wondering what I would do if I had the time (and the money) to dedicate to the betterment of myself. There are three things I'd love to do, excluding travel which would be my number one.

Singing Lessons - I've always loved to sing, but I'm not very good at it. I must have music playing and it has to be loud for me to sing. But I am definitely not a pop singer. If I were to get lessons, it would have to be to be a rock singer or I'm not interested.

Cake Decorating - Oh, I can do the basic stuff, the stuff they do at the grocery store bakery. What I'm wowed by are the people who can create perfectly edible creations that look real. That's what I'd like to learn how to make.

Photography - I'm already a pretty good amateur photographer, but most of the pictures I have taken so far are for business or baby pictures. I'd love to learn more techniques and get even better at it.

So how about you? What would you do if time and money were no object?

Talking About My Generation

I read an article recently about how no one has created a name yet for kids who were born after Generation Y. Should it be named Generation Z or something more creative? Each generation, after all, has its own identity, shaped by the events going on at the time and parents who raised them.

So this had me curious, what sort of identity does my generation, the Gen Xers have? I looked it up on search.com and this is what I found:

"Generation X was generally marked early on by its lack of optimism for the future, nihilism, cynicism, skepticism, alienation and mistrust in traditional values and institutions

"As young adults, Generation X drew media attention in the late 1980s and early 1990s, gaining a stereotypical reputation as apathetic, cynical, disaffected, streetwise loners and slackers.

"As Generation Xers have now become parents, however, their media persona is gradually becoming more that of protective security moms and dads in a post 9/11 world."

Source: http://www.search.com/reference/Generation_X

I have to say that's a pretty accurate description. I still possess most of those qualities and probably will never lose them. But far as how I am as a Gen X parent, I am a lot less protective than my own mom. I can tell simply by looking at how she interacts with my daughter.

We’ll see what sort of parent I am as my daughter grows. I know bad things happen in this world and that you can’t always tell a “bad” person by looking at them. I hope I’ll be able to teach my daughter to be cautious around strangers and who she trusts without making her overly cautious. I hope she’ll be wise enough to know there is no such as job security without feeling like there is no reason to try in school or at work. It will be a delicate balance, but I’d rather she learned about these things from other people’s mistakes than through experience.

As for us Gen Xers, we’re the kids of Vietnam Vets, of hippies, of anarchists, of free loving pot smokers. Our parents came of age during the turbulent 60’s and 70’s. That shaped who they are and in turn how they were as parents, how they raised us. We were doomed from the start.

Facebook Dos and Don'ts

Not long ago, I wrote a post about how Facebook sold users information to advertisers. This post is a follow up to that post.


Seven Ways to Keep Yourself Safe on Facebook

1. Don't have a week password.

2. Don't reveal your entire birthday.

3. Don't overlook privacy settings.

4. Don't tag anything with your child's full name.

5. Don't tell anyone when you're going out of town.

6. Don't let search engines find you.

7. Don't let kids go online alone.

Many of these things may sound like common sense, but if everyone knew this there wouldn't be news stories written about it. Make sure you kids, friends and family stay safe while online.

To read the whole article and view the video: http://www.fox8.com/news/wjw-facebook-dos-and-donts,0,2272036.story

The Worst Invention Known to Baby

My vote for the worst baby invention of all time is any article of clothing that snaps in the crotch. These must have been invented by someone who has never had children. Oh, they're great in principle but certainly not in practice.


You would think dressing a newborn it would be easy. Not if your newborn is anything like my daughter was at that age. She would fight whenever you tried to change either her diaper or her clothing. She'd kick and scratch. The nurses in the hospital said they never saw anything like it. It took her several weeks to calm down. At that point, I vowed never to buy snap crotch clothing again. And I didn't. We got them as gifts.

As my daughter grew and learned to roll over, sit up, stand and walk, it became more and more difficult to dress her in anything that involves buttons and snaps. She's impatient to go play. She thinks it's funny to kick and roll over when I'm trying to snap her up. When we weren't leaving the house, I started leaving the crotches unsnapped. That solved the problem for a while.

But then she learned how to take her own diapers off so I had a new problem. Even if I did snap the crotch shut, she knew how to unsnap it. I started dressing her in the snap crotches clothes less and less, which made me very happy, and dressed her instead in regular pants and diaper covers. This worked out a lot better.

Thankfully, by winter she'll be in size 24 months or even 2T so the snap crotch bottoms should be a thing of the past. But if the snap crotches do exist in that size, I'm sure someone will find them and give them to us as a gift. If they do, they're going back to the store.

Can't Pick Just One

There were too many interesting stories this week, so I decided to pick three news stories for my News Story of the Week. I picked these three because they are radically different stories.


Life on Titan?

Scientists have a mystery on Saturn's moon, Titan. Hydrogen in Titan's atmosphere is disappearing below the surface. A NASA astrobiologist speculates the hydrogen could be disappearing because some form of life is consuming it. Other scientists say it's way too soon to assume there are little ETs on Titan. If, and it's a big if, there are microbes living there, it would mean life started in two places in our solar system, and if it started in more than one place here, it means it's more likely to have started elsewhere. The thought the universe is full of life is very exciting.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20100607/sc_space/strangediscoveryontitanleadstospeculationofalienlife

Van der Sloot Confesses

Joran van der Sloot confesses to the murder of Stephany Flores. Why did he kill her? Because she had looked up the Natalee Holloway case on his computer while he was out of the room. If that doesn't say guilty conscious, I don't know what does.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37587945/ns/world_news-americas/

Woman Uses 911 as Dating Service

An Alliance, OH, woman called 911 and told the dispatcher she needed a husband. She called five times and spent three days in jail. Why did she call? Because she had been drinking vodka with a friend to celebrate her new apartment and got lonely. She now admits she should have called the crisis hotline instead.

http://www.fox8.com/news/offbeat/wjw-woman-calls-911-looking-for-love,0,4839647.story

Be Thankful This Isn't Victorian England

Jack the Ripper is the ultimate cold case. Even to this day, historians and police officers, forensic scientists and psychological profilers try to solve the case. Every once in a while, one of these people will appear on TV. That's exactly what happened on the Science Channel Monday night.


I find these shows fascinating. Each of these educated people has their opinion as to who the prime suspect is and they go about trying to prove it with the available evidence. Sadly, the case will probably never be solved. It occurred a decade before mug shots and finger printing and well before things like DNA evidence or even keeping hair and skin samples.

I feel badly for the women who have gone down into history for no other reason than how they died. I also feel badly for the lifestyle these women were forced to live. Whitechapel (the London borough where the murders took place) in Victorian times was a very rough place. It was a slum, but slums in Victorian times were different than they are now. There was no such thing as socialization or public assistance. People were left to fend for themselves. They lived in a form of poverty we only see now in third world countries.

A century ago, there were few job opportunities for women. There were even fewer job opportunities for poor women. The women who were Jack the Ripper's victims were forced into prostitution by poverty, society and their lack of education. I imagine in 1888 it must have been incredibly frightening to be in their position. A serial killer was killing prostitutes yet they were forced into the profession to pay for a roof over their heads and food into their stomachs.

Be thankful you live in the time you do. Yes, there are still killers today, a lot more of them than there were in 1888, but you live in a society where women have a chance at a better life. You had the opportunity to go to school, maybe even to go to college. You can apply to any job you are qualified for, start your own business, run for political office, vote, speak your mind. And, when times get tough, you live in a world where there are unemployment benefits, financial aid and food stamps. You have more opportunities now than women have ever had in history. Make the most of it.

Suspect in Holloway Case Arrested for Murder

Natalee Holloway is one of those people who is a household name for being a victim of a crime. She's the Alabama teen who disappeared five years ago while on a senior class trip to Aruba. The prime suspect in her disappearance is Joran van der Sloot. Earlier this the week, van der Sloot was arrested on murder changes. But it wasn't for Holloway's murder, it was for the death of another young woman.


The young woman, Stephany Flores, met van der Sloot the day before her murder at a Lima, Peru, casino. She was found dead in a hotel room, her neck broken.

In addition to being charged with Flores' murder in Peru, he was also charged here in the United States with extortion. It hasn't been released who he was trying to extort, but he alleged asked for $250,000 in exchange for details on Holloway's death and the location of her body.

In 2008, van der Sloot was caught by a journalist on tape saying he had Holloway's body thrown into the ocean. Another journalist reported van der Sloot was recruiting Thai women for sex work in the Netherlands.

One of van der Sloot's attorneys said, "Joran van der Sloot has been falsely accused of murder once before. The fact is he wears a bull's-eye on his back now and he is a quote-unquote usual suspect when it comes to allegations of foul play."

Van der Sloot's attorney might feel he is falsely accused, but in my mind there is no doubt of his guilt. All these events could not be coincidence. He has a rich, powerful father. The way I see it, van der Sloot is a spoiled rich kid who believes he is above the law and can do whatever he wants. He doesn't feel like the rules that apply to the rest of us apply to him.

I hope the Holloway family gets some peace from this arrest. Yes, it's not an arrest in Natalee's case, but hopefully, if van der Sloot eventually ends up in prison, it will be poetic justice.

You can read about the case here http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37470839/ns/world_news-americas?GT1=43001 and here http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37492667/ns/world_news-americas/