Parents in Prince George’s County have been ordered to appear at a special court hearing today where they will be given a choice: Get their children vaccinated on the spot or risk up to 10 days in jail and fines.

Does this sound strange to anyone else?

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Parents of unvaccinated students threatened with jail time

The write up on Love, for example, reads:

The offence: shooting heroin while she was pregnant.

The nasty details: In 1992, Vanity Fair reported that Courtney Love was using heroin while she was carrying her daughter Francis Bean. Whaaaa?

Crummy mummy legacy: The troubled Love denied this 1992 story, claiming that she went cold turkey before conceiving her baby girl. Poor, poor, drug-addled Courtney. Sad though it has been to watch this train wreck of a celeb come undone, knowingly frying your brain while you are pregnant gives new meaning to the expression “dumb blonde.”

One thing I love about this list is that it also includes terrible moms and dads from movies. On the list, Mrs. Bates from Psycho and Jack Torrence from The Shining. I only wish an actor/actress and one of their characters made both the real life and movie list.

Any suggestions that fit the criteria?

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Horrid Hollywood Parents

Moms-to-be who have low vitamin D levels during pregnancy appear to be at increased risk for suffering from pre-eclampsia, according to a study.

Pre-eclampsia is a condition of pregnancy that usually begins with high blood pressure. The disorder may also lead to seizures, kidney failure or stroke. It slows the growth of the fetus, can cause early delivery, and can be fatal for the mother and the infant. The cause is unknown and there is no treatment, except to manage the symptoms.

It’s worth a read for expectant mothers and the fathers who eat with them.

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Low vitamin D tied to serious pregnancy complication

A man in Queensland, Australia was surfing the net when some loon walked into his house, picked up his child and walked out. Luckily the thief was not successful.

“…the father of the house was on the computer and heard a noise and turned around to find a male carrying out his three-year-old son,”

It’s not a joking matter, but just another example of just how lost you can become while on the computer.

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The Dangers of the Internet

I have never spent time in jail and my dog is far too big to carry around under my arm.

I do not have armies of vapid and spoiled teenagers yearning to be me, (at least not that I know of)

…and I still want to be a parent.
A friend of Paris Hilton recently quoted her as having said “…I decided it’s time for me to grow up and take responsibility – and the best way to do that is to become a mother.”

It made me realize that I may be having a child for the wrong reasons. Granted, my wife looks really cute pregnant, but my intentions aren’t to have a new accessory or besmirch an innocent and blank slate in hopes of cleaning up my own act. Why then, would anyone have kids?

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Paris Hilton wants to be a mother, and other signs of the apocalypse

Questions of paternity are among the largest concerns on the minds of fathers and expectant dads everywhere, but apparently it fairs significantly on the minds of the mothers, too. Wow.

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Home paternity tests?!

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Brangelina, another kid?!

While it wasn’t a name that I was tied to, it was definitely different and memorable. I like traditional names, but the idea of s0mething different was also appealing. Joie over at Crucial Minutiae has an interesting article about baby naming and says that it “has turned into a high stakes ‘individuality’ contest.” And as bad as my wife may have considered the name to be, some people are taking it too far. At least I didn’t choose “@”. That’s right, someone wanted to name their child “@”, and no it wasn’t Prince, Seal, Shakira or McLovin.
According to Reuters in Beijing,

A Chinese couple tried to name their baby “@,” claiming the character used in e-mail addresses echoed their love for the child, an official trying to whip the national language into line said Thursday.

The unusual name stands out especially in Chinese, which has no alphabet and instead uses tens of thousands of multi-stroke characters to represent words.

“The whole world uses it to write e-mail, and translated into Chinese it means ‘love him’,” the father explained, according to the deputy chief of the State Language Commission Li Yuming.

While “@” is familiar to Chinese e-mail users, they often use the English word “at” to sound it out — which with a drawn out “T” sounds something like “ai ta,” or “love him,” to Mandarin speakers. (Full story on Reuters.)

In light of this, maybe my suggestions won’t seem so bad to my wife. We still have another few months to go though and she’s hormonal, so we’ll see.

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The joys of baby naming

” Fighting off contractions, Antoria went before the judges and sang her best — and even made it through to the next round.

After her tryout, she was taken to a local hospital where she gave birth to a bouncing baby boy weighing 6 lbs., 7 oz., who she promptly named Jamil Labarron Idol McCowan.“

Full story on MSNBC.

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Woman gives birth after American Idol tryout

While I’m joking about the diapers, these guys are serious about the backpacks. The pair got the idea for the bags after the Columbine school shootings, and have the packs on the market just in time for back to school shopping. Does this product play upon heightened media fear mongering? Very much so, that’s what marketing does. It plants a seed of doubt in your mind and plays with your emotions. On the flip side, does it provide a valid function of protecting your children? Most definitely.

The question of whether or not these packs are something you buy for your child becomes a balance of reasonable expectation with expendable cash. Is $175 not a big deal to spend on a backpack for you? Then why not buy it. Is there a reasonable expectation that your child will be shot at school? Not likely. However Columbine and Virginia Tech were not plagued by violence previous to the atrocities that happened there. Any one of the parents of students at those schools, even if not victims, would have gladly paid $175 had they known in advance what their children would be subjected to.

This YouTube video demonstrates Glock 9mm ballistics tests and impressively, the round does not penetrate the backpack. Granted, your child’s ribs may be broken from the impact, but I’d trade any number of cracked ribs for the alternative.

In the process of writing this post I considered whether or not I would buy one. And yes, I would, but I tend to be hyper-protective of my loved ones, which is also the reason I’ve registered for the Graco MAV (medium armored vehicle) stroller.

Would you buy one for your kid?

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Kevlar diapers and bulletproof backpacks