Families and Parenting

140 posts

Women’s Day Warm Up – No Man Would or Could Do This

Amber Miller, 27 years old,  completed the Chicago Marathon this Sunday at a relatively slow time of 6:25:50.  That isn’t a terribly remarkable feat, especially given that she ran the Wisconsin Marathon in May and logged in a time of 4:23:07. Was she disappointed? Not at all.

What is remarkable is that Miller was just shy of 39 weeks pregnant while running the Chicago Marathon and felt contractions begin several minutes after she crossed the finish line.   When contractions became regular she stopped to get a sandwich. Only a handful of hours later, she popped out baby June who was a hefty 7 lbs 13 oz. As a thrice pregnant lady, I can tell you that I also find it astounding that she ran a damn fine marathon in Wisconsin when she was 17 weeks pregnant. Continue reading →

Daddy’s Little Hell on Wheels

I wouldn’t consider myself a chauvinist but I admit that I was a tad disappointed when I first learned my wife and I were going to have a girl. Honestly, the prospect frightened me a little. I imagined a room decorated in pink, swathed in rainbows and flowers. Everything would be soft and perhaps frilly with bits of lace.

Even more worrying to my male brain was the prospect that I wouldn’t be able to do the things I’d hoped to do with a son. Games of catch would be replaced with tea parties, Hot Wheels with baby dolls and she’d rather watch My Little Pony over Transformers.  Continue reading →

My Dad The Tinkerer

Hereford Inlet, N. Wildwood, NJ

When he was 18, his father dropped dead of a heart attack. On Olney Avenue in Philadelphia, the world no longer included school in South Bend. And in spite of a tight-knit Irish Catholic family, he took it on his slender shoulders.

My dad was a tinkerer. When we renovated the house down the shore, he told me about his grandfather’s hardware store, and pointed to the tools that had skipped a generation to him. It might have been around that time that he mentioned why his grandparents bought it. That house was, and remains, linked to his own dad. They bought it that summer for the family. Maybe as a celebration.

Tinkering and his logical mind brought him to engineering. He traded Notre Dame for the Main Line, and ended up with a Ph. D in physics. He also met the woman he’d fall for around that time.  Continue reading →

Autism Intervention Doesn’t Stop With the Kids

Emotions tend to run extremely high when talking about the autism spectrum disorders, and for good reason. Very little is concretely known about the cause of the disorder, and while there are modes of treatment that are empirically supported (such as ABA therapy), panic runs so high upon diagnosis, the long, hard slog of behavioral therapy is often forgone in favor of the miracle cure.

When I first began working in 2008, prevalence rates sat at 1:125; today they are closer to 1:91. For many parents, it feels like we’re in the middle of an unstoppable epidemic.

The field is tantamount to the Wild West– oversight is minimal, the types of licensure available are few (and the requirements and oversights as compared to, say, those for licensed professional counselors, are extremely lax), and evidence-based treatment is neglected in favor of fad ‘cures’ marketed to desperate parents. Continue reading →

Sperm Bank Tells Gingers to Beat It

Redheaded men who want to pass on their gingerness are being treated like the proverbial red-headed stepchildren by Danish sperm bank Cryos.

Cryos is the largest sperm bank in the world.  It distributes more swimmers than Speedo, in a claimed 65 countries.  And now this sperm bank whale has thrown its weight behind the many who cruelly discriminate against gingers. Continue reading →

QOTD: What’s Your Best Wedding Horror Story?

Inspired by alluson’s the-tailor-lost-my-bridesmaid-dress story on Wednesday afternoon, I’m asking you to share your best wedding-related horror story.

I’ve personally accompanied a bride to the dry-cleaner who was supposed to clean and box up her dress in one of those lasts-forever preservation boxes. Only guess what, no dress anywhere. So she gives them the evil eye and walks into their workroom. Oh, there’s the dress – on the floor, kicked into the corner.

Then there was the wedding I was attending wherein the groom accidentally stood (both feet) on the bride’s gown’s train. She SHRIEKED at him, I mean really shrieked. Starting married life off on a sour note, so to speak. Continue reading →

The Smug Parent Game

Smugness is a key tool in modern parenting. You can’t be any kind of effective parent if you don’t feel morally superior to the parents around you. The good news is that through the right methodologies, you can increase your smugness “account balance”. There’s no need to settle for off-the-cuff parenting when you can lord your superior decisions over other parents.

Your smugness score is based on many factors. Here are some point guidelines. The higher your score, the better your standing among the Smug Parents of the world. Be careful! You can easily lose points by making bad decisions. Continue reading →

Brothers and Sisters

My mom has seven siblings. My dad has three. I have one. Can you imagine having 150? As the New York Times recently reported, Cynthia Daily wanted to find some her child’s half siblings. (She and her partner used a sperm donor to conceive.) Apparently Daily’s child has 150 half-siblings.

“Today there are 150 children, all conceived with sperm from one donor, in this group of half siblings, and more are on the way. “It’s wild when we see them all together — they all look alike,” said Ms. Daily, 48, a social worker in the Washington area who sometimes vacations with other families in her son’s group.” Continue reading →