Posts from — January 2009

Shelley Price doesn’t love her own daughter, and fears she never will. This tearful mother of two is telling her story because she believes that she isn’t the only mother to ever tackle such a taboo subject, and hopes she may help others come to terms with this unspeakable truth. How can this be? (Update: The story that originally ran on dailymail.co.uk on January 22, 2009 was pulled off the site the following day. Read on and you’ll see why.) Price was just 22 when she had her eldest daughter, Catherine, now 11. Shortly after Catherine’s birth, a five-year relationship with the father fizzled. That didn’t help matters. [Read more →]

There are days when life for Adwai Malual looks like an endless wheel. Already she has lived through much: growing up in Sudan as war tore apart her homeland, discovering in the midst of it that she was pregnant, coming to this strange land of America.Then, weeks later, she gave birth to quintuplets.

Now, in a small, crowded apartment in Laurel nearly two months after the babies’ delivery, Malual’s life is dominated by another kind of chaos. It begins every day at 3 a.m., as she wakes up to take over feeding duties from her mother, visiting from Sudan. One by one, she tends to her five babies in 40-minute shifts. By the time she has changed the last one’s diaper, the first is crying for food again. And so it goes for 12 hours straight, until she hands them off to her mother so she can sleep for a little while before waking do it all again.

Life is now confined to this second-floor apartment and to the most basic of human needs: eating, peeing, pooping, burping and sleeping.

“I am grateful for the blessings in my life,” the 28-year-old said recently during a rare break from her babies. “And I am tired.”

All day long, her mind alternates between those two states. She thanks God for the people — many of them complete strangers — who donated diapers, time and money to help her through her grueling first few weeks out of the hospital. Then she prays for some way to survive the weeks ahead.

When Malual, who had been working as a branch inspector of a bank in southern Sudan, first learned that she was pregnant with multiple children — three or four, her doctors in Sudan guessed — she thought it would be easy. “It was my first time as mother,” she laughed.

[Read more →]

Anne Hathaway wants to baby-sit them. The Jonas Brothers are happy serenading them. The Bush daughters want to give them advice. A lot of people want to dress like them. The youngest residents of the White House have sure grabbed Americans’ attention — on and offline.

It’s true that being the daughters of the president of the United States has got to be a tough act. But that mantle is lightly held by Malia, 10 and Sasha, 7, the daughters of first couple Barack and Michelle Obama. Ever since they’ve been headed to the White House, the daughters have been gaining attention, with the curious turning to their computers to find out more. Since inauguration, searches on the two girls soared over 500%. The curious want to know, “how tall is malia obama,” “sasha obama age,” and “letter to sasha and malia.”

But the inauguration weekend launched the girls into a new level of celebrity with frenzied searches on everything from “sasha and malia inauguration outfits,” “malia and sasha obama pictures,” and “sasha and malia obama and jonas brothers.” The girls, who got their own fashion press, heated up hits on the website J.Crew, causing it to crash after it was revealed that their coats came from the online store. (The site right now is featuring sketches of the girls in their inauguration coats.)

Newsweek even asked, “Are Sasha and Malia bigger than Miley Cyrus?” While they don’t have their own TV show yet, never say never.

The ultimate nod to their rise to top of the pop-culture heap has got to be the Beanie Babies namesake dolls that have just come out, although the company claims that they just liked the names and are not named after the first daughters.

Perhaps father does know best. When asked by George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “This Week” how his daughters managed their first week of school, Obama replied, “They seemed to thrive. I’m trying to figure out why it is that they don’t seemed to be fazed by anything. People think — you know, folks think I’m cool, they are a lot cooler than I am.”

That’s one point on which father and daughters would probably agree.

President-elect Barack Obama has already filled his cabinet with Washington veterans like Hillary Clinton – but could there be room for Hollywood in his administration?

Anne Hathaway is just one star who would love a job in the Obama White House.

“I would want to be head babysitter,” the Bride Wars star tells PEOPLE. “I’d love to be First Babysitter, absolutely.”

Hathaway, 26, is not the only celebrity who would jump at the chance to spend time with Obama’s daughters, Sasha, 7, and Malia, 10. High School Musical star Corbin Bleu says he would happily perform for the first daughters.

“I’ll just go up and do performances for his kids all day and just keep them entertained,” he tells PEOPLE. “They seem like really sweet girls. They seem very well mannered. So I would be First Entertainer.”

American Idol runner-up David Archuleta echoed that sentiment. “I would give the girls music lessons,” he tells PEOPLE. “Probably not piano lessons, because I’m far from the greatest pianist, but voice lessons.”