Also, they haven’t yet met Mr Right and they don’t want their careers to suffer, apparently. But a whopping 60% of those young women surveyed said they were putting off having babies because of the cost.

However, for slightly older women (Gen Xers, 30-39 year olds), half of those surveyed said the main reason they hadn’t sprogged up yet was because they hadn’t found the right bloke. And only 17% of these ‘old birds’ said their jobs were a priority over having children.

So what are we to make of it all? Well, if you’re The Australian newspaper, you take the survey’s results as a warning to youngsters not to wait for advancing years and rapidly approaching infertility, but to plan on having kids sooner rather than later.

Which is all well and good, but what if the desire hasn’t hit you yet and you’re having too much fun travelling around the world at a moment’s notice – or hell, even going to the shop for some milk spontaneously? What if the idea of kids just isn’t in your orbit? What if, Heaven forfend, it never ends up being on your To Do List, or you never feel ‘ready’? Is it not perhaps irresponsible to be urging women to get pregnant out of fear that one day it may be too late – when they have yet to meet a decent man or feel even remotely like kissing their youth goodbye?

Just a thought.

But what do you reckon? Are you a Gen Yer who’d rather get on with her career and earn some cash than pop one out? Or are you a Gen Xer who didn’t want kids when she was younger and now fears it may be too late? Let us know in the comments boxes below.

Actually, I kinda have to give Octomum a leetle bit of credit for finally admitting that being a single mother (fathers unknown) with 14 kids and no income is a bit of a bad situation to get oneself into. Who can argue with that appraisal of the situation?

As she said in an interview in Us Weekly:

“I think it was a mistake — in terms of the well-being of the octuplets and of my other kids. I can’t give myself to them 100 percent…if I’d known that, I never would have fathomed having eight more.”

Of course, attorney Gloria Allred had to put in her two cents about the supposedly controversial statement:

“I think it’s very, very sad when any mother calls her child, or in this case, eight little babies, a mistake.

How are the babies going to feel when they grow up and read one day, as they will, or view on the internet, as they will, the fact that their mother calls them a mistake?”

Oooh ooh, I think I know… I hope that when Octomum’s kids read it on the internet, they agree with her — like any other sane person. Maybe it will encourage them to make a pledge to be responsible parents and have only as many children as they can legitimately care for. How bout that?

I guess there’s really no right thing for Octomum to say anymore. She should just keep quiet and thank her lucky stars that she finally landed a reality show.

Source/Photo

Get it from Small Concept for $US32. Also available in blue.

Spilt milk? Crayon on the wall? Smushed, mushed grapes in the carpet? Eh! It’s baby vs. dog with this “It Was The Dog” onesie. Pumpkin orange and trimmed in bright vintage-inspired white, this conversation piece is gender-neutral. It’s also 100 per cent silky soft cotton with traditional snaps in the crotch for quick dressing and diaper changing. Tell the dog it was a gift from grandma or someone equally important so the baby, you know, has to wear it. Sorry Spot!

Buy it at SandBoxCouture for $US26.95.

Young Honor didn’t wear the crib shoes of a wall flower. No sir. She wore a pair of ultra shiny metallic Baby Tracks sneakers by Trumpette. These stylish crib shoes come in silver/pink, silver/blue, gold/pink, or gold/blue. You can pick up a pair direct from Trumpette for $US27.50

You know you’ve played, “Tickle the baby with a knife” before.

Satan’s spawn, need I say more? Worst part, Satan is totally a deadbeat dad.

#2 Eraserhead

For those of you who have not caught this David Lynch classic, Eraserhead is essentially a feature-length safe-sex public service announcement. According to Wikipedia:

“Henry (the protagonist) is cornered by Mary’s mother and told that Mary has just had a baby after an abnormally short pregnancy. Henry is then obliged to marry her.

Mary and the baby move into Henry’s one-room apartment. The baby is hideously deformed and has an amphibious appearance: a large snout-nose with slit nostrils, a pencil-thin neck, eyes on the sides of its head, no ears and a limbless body covered in bandages. It continually whines throughout the night.”

Yep, this is horror movie about having babies.

#4 Trainspotting

Got anyone who needs to kick the habit? I suggest hiring this demonic, ceiling-crawling heroin nightmare baby. Helped me give up Sweet & Low.

For more scary babies, hit up Funny or Die.

“But how?” they ask. “I need more information, father.” (These are very articulate children.)

If you want to tell them the truth, you can use this Danish book, which is very graphic.

But if you want to lie to them, you can use this video.

See? Daddy put mummy’s finger in his mouth and blew her up like a balloon. And then, out popped the baby! Like magic!

By the way, I’m kidding about the “lie to your kids” thing. The video, by Cassidy Curtis and Raquel Coelho, does not suggest that you should lie to your kids about where babies come from. It’s just a funny video. Well done.

Source: Buzzfeed via ThingamaBaby from OtherThings.com

Slate headed over to L.A.’s Baby and Tween Celebration, which offers a cornucopia of costly, unnecessary, and potentially soul-destroying
gear for your baby or toddler. As far as I could tell from the video, the only reason “Tween” is in the title is because the convention aims to get kids started on tweendom well before they can walk.

My favorite character—I mean, presenter—at the convention is a fashion designer who was sick of dressing her toddler in clothes that “didn’t
match hers.” So she started a kids’ clothes line that would make her daughter
look as “hip” as she does. Unfortunately for her daughter, this woman’s idea of hip is leopard print bell bottoms.

And don’t miss the founders of Heelarious (baby’s first high heels!) describing how the business came about—now, that’s hilarious.

Photo: New York Post

For a long time, scientists thought “nothing much.” In fact, until the 1970s doctors would perform surgery on infants without anesthesia (!!) thinking that they were so unconscious they could not feel pain. As it turns out, the infant brain is a lot more active than previously thought.

Jonah Lehrer wrote an article for the Boston Globe a week or so back called “Inside the Baby Brain” that examines this question, and it’s absolutely fascinating (Lehrer is a really good science writer for the layperson, I think). It talks about how babies’ brains are more like lanterns, casting a diffuse glow on everything, versus the adult brain which is more like the intense, focused beam of a flashlight.

One example he gives is a study where kids were shown two cards, but asked to remember only the one on the right. The more focused brains of adults and older children could perform the task easily, while the more diffuse brains of young children were more likely to remember the card they were told to ignore.

This is thought to help children learn about the world. As one psychologist Lehrer interviewed said, “….children, it turns out, are much better at picking up on all the extraneous stuff that’s going on… And this makes sense: If you don’t know how the world works, then how do you know what to focus on? You should try to take everything in.”

Just another way these unique little people we live with are so intriguing.

BABIES in NSW are being born up to 21 per cent bigger than they were two decades ago, putting a generation at an increased risk of developing asthma, diabetes and cancers of the blood, prostate, breast and colon later in life.

But it appears this may be yet another media health beat up – as revealed by excellent blog Hoyden About Town.

Lauredhel has published the actual graphs that accompanied the report which the SMH story is based upon, and it appears that there has been no apparent increase in birth weight for the last five years.

The table shows the mean birthweights for male and female live-born term singletons in NSW from 1990 to 2005. The mean birthweight rose from 1990 to a peak at 2000, from about 3510 to 3540 for boys, and from about 3375 to 3405 for girls (these numbers are eyeballed; the data isn’t included.) In the old language, that’s about an ounce. A good part of that increase, though not all, is attributable to decreasing levels of maternal smoking – as the authors note.

This is a good thing right – less babies affected by nicotline in-utero?

After the year 2000, the mean birthweight FELL. Significantly. Down to about 3525 for boys, and 3390 for girls. Then it plateaued. For the past four or five years, there has been no noticeable change, and definitely no trend, in mean birthweights for either boys or girls.

But if you just read the abstract, which is as much as the vast majority of people who will quote this paper will ever read, you’d think that was a progressive or accelerating increase.

Even the percentage in SMH’s opening article is a furphy. While the amount of girl babies born large for their gestational age did increase by 21%, it’s a tricky percentage. In terms of the percentage of large girl babies born within all girl babies born in NSW, the numbers only increased from 9.1% to 11.0%.

The problem with bad science reporting such as this is that it paints modern women as fat lazy slobs who can’t put down the Tim Tams long enough to care about making an average-sized baby.

Yes we should be concerned about obesity-related health issues, but there is no evidence at the moment that obesity rates for children and adults are on a skyrocketing upwards trend. In fact, new research suggests that child obesity rates too have plateaued over the last 5-10 years. Epidemic? Hardly.  In fact, just as many children are malnourished as are obese. Yet nobody wrings their hands over those children.