Category — Kids In The News

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.

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Loaded weapons and lil ones don’t mix in my opinion. I hope my daughter and son never wrap their hands around a gun. Not now or ever. Growing up in San Francisco in the 80s, it wasn’t all too unusual to see a gun cabinet at a friend’s house or hear a rumor that their father had a gun. My own dad took me target shooting when I was ten. But, times have changed and I’m not keen on my children attending a playdate in a home that had firearms. Why? Because accidents happen and not all people take the proper precautions in storing weapons and as a result, kids die.

We told you about the four-year-old that shot herself when she pulled her grandma’sloaded gun from her purse in Sam’s Club and a father who forced his six-year-old daughter to pose with a pistol. Yesterday, news reports said  a child was shot when her drunk father cleaned his firearms. Though the headlines are few and far between, every fatality is worrisome. Are you a gun free family?

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Because it’s tropical storm season I figured parents need to know as much as possible about how to handle things and keep kids calm during a storm. Here’s a great story I found online…….

Q.My family moved to South Florida recently and Fay will be our first tropical ”event.” My husband and I are a little worried about how our two kids might handle it and, with the prospect of being without electricity, it will be harder than usual to keep them distracted. Does Action Line have any ideas to share?
A.First of all, try to keep a level head. With all the rushing around to stock up on hurricane supplies, the calamitous TV newscasts and worsening weather, it’s easy to get worked up about an impending storm. But, if your children see you keeping your cool, they will, too.

Here are some tips for keeping the young ones occupied and calm before the storm:

• Don’t leave the TV on constantly: Check periodically for updates, but you don’t need to follow continuous coverage; it only heightens stress. [Read more →]

“What do you do all day?” is a question Anne Marie Davis, 34, says she gets a lot. Davis, who lives in Lewisville, Texas, isn’t a mother, nor does she telecommute. She is a stay-at-home wife, which makes her something of a pioneer in the post-feminist world.Ten years ago, she was an “overwhelmed” high school English teacher. “I didn’t have time for my husband, ” she says, “and I didn’t have a life.”
She presented the idea of staying home to her husband, a Web engineer. “I told him it was something I wanted to do, and he supported it. It was a great relief.”

Dr. Scott Haltzman, author of “The Secrets of Happily Married Women,” says stay-at-home wives constitute a growing niche. “In the past few years, many women who are well educated and trained for career tracks have decided instead to stay at home,” he says. While his research is ongoing, he estimates that more than 10 percent of the 650 women he’s interviewed who choose to stay home are childless.

Daniel Buccino, a Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine clinical social worker and psychotherapist, says stay-at-home wives are the latest “status symbols.” “It says, ‘We make enough money that we both don’t need to work outside the home,’” he says. “And especially with the recent economic pressures, a stay-at-home spouse is often an extreme and visible luxury.” [Read more →]

When Keri McCartney was 6-months pregnant, doctors discovered a large tumor growing from her unborn baby’s tailbone. Though the growth was non-cancerous, it was full of blood vessels and as big as the fetus itself, presenting a deadly threat.

In February, doctors at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston removed the fetus from McCartney’s uterus, took out the tumor and then returned the fetus. Ten weeks later, on May 3, Macie Hope McCartney was born again. Read The Full Story

A very small percentage of women will suffer from an ectopic pregnancy. An ectopic pregnancy is defined as: development of a fertilized egg elsewhere than in the uterus (as in a fallopian tube or the peritoneal cavity)

According to WebMD,

There is no way to save an ectopic pregnancy. It cannot turn into a normal pregnancy. If the egg keeps growing in the fallopian tube, it can damage or burst the tube and cause heavy bleeding that could be deadly. If you have an ectopic pregnancy, you will need quick treatment to end it before it causes dangerous problems. 

In a very rare case, doctors missed the opportunity to diagnose Meera Thangarajah with such a pregnancy. After enduring an ovarian pregnancy, the happy family welcomed a daughter into their family. The couple named their baby girl Durga, which means Goddess.
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From Green Eggs and Ham to To Kill a Mockingbird, kids seem to pick the classics when it’s time to read, according to a study of 78.5 million books read by more than 3 million children nationwide.

Dr. Seuss’s book was the most popular choice among first graders, Renaissance Learning found. The company, which looked at kids in 9,800 schools for the study, manages a program in which students take computerized reading comprehension quizzes. Students earn points based on the book’s word difficulty, word length, sentence length, and total number of words. Many schools even award prizes to students for their efforts in the program.

Some teachers were pleased with the popularity of To Kill a Mockingbird, which topped the list for ninth-through-12th graders. Others say the book owes much of its success to the fact that teachers make it a requirement. (The report doesn’t distinguish between books that were assigned and those students chose.

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NEW YORK, May 2 (UPI) — She may be one of the world’s most famous women, but U.S. actress Gwyneth Paltrow says she doesn’t think her two small children are aware of what her job is.Asked what her daughter Apple and son Moses think about mommy playing an action hero in “Iron Man,” Paltrow told UPI: “They have no idea what I do. I don’t think they have a clue. I’m not an action hero, I’m just a secretary.”In the blockbuster-to-be, Paltrow plays Pepper Potts, resourceful assistant to Tony Stark, aka Iron Man.Paltrow, who has made a career in grown-up movies like “Shakespeare in Love,” “Emma” and “Possession,” said “Iron Man” isn’t more on her kids’ radar because it is a superhero flick.

“They’re only 3 and 2, not really. No,” she said.

Director Jon Favreau told UPI he thinks many people will check out “Iron Man” because of its cast.

Although Paltrow and her co-star Robert Downey Jr. are not normally associated with big box-office hits, Favreau noted, “They are people everyone is very interested in.”

“Literally, we would go to the London premiere and the shoes (Paltrow) wore would be on the front page of every London paper and (on) every Internet blog,” he said.

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Competition for spots in acceptable state schools is so fierce in Spain, that parents are getting divorces in order to give their children an advantage. Under Spanish law, children living with a single parent get extra points on their applications.

Family courts have noticed that the numbers of official separation rose by 50 percent right before the deadline for school registration. In Spain, spouses can secure a divorce in only five weeks. After school placement is over, officials claim that many couples are back in court seeking reconciliation.

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Its really hot in Texas so we decided to give him sugar free popsicles . Can you tell his happy? I’m sticking to sugar free treats from now on because we were at Starbucks yesterday and I gave him some of my vanilla frappuccino and it turned out to be a really bad idea! It was non stop jumping he was everywhere. I’ve never seen him so excited and full of energy and I never thought he could ever get any more hyper than he already was. He was babbling, and spinning, jumping, crawling around ,picking up and touching everything he could get his hands on. It was like he drank 10 red bulls and when into fast forward. We all had a pretty good laugh, and it took hours for him to calm down, so I learned a very valuable lesson as a new mom, NEVER EVER give your toddler vanilla frappuccino or anything too sweet. The results will vary but you will have your work cut out for you trust me!