Strollerderby : crazy

Think Your Kids Are Driving You Crazy? Caffeine Tied to Hallucinations

JeanneSager — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 17:57:00 GMT

There is an unspoken rule in our house that I do not have to fully listen to my daughter until I have had my caffeine injection. That's all I need - one big gulp of diet Pepsi, and I am a fully functioning parent.

But a normal parent can hear voices, right? Or maybe have a mirage - a clean toy room - pop up in front of their eyes? Oh come on, don't tell me you haven't heard "I want to go to bed early tonight, after I eat my green beans and take a quick bath" in your head over and over until your spouse told you wipe the stupid grin off of your face.

Now we can blame it on the real mother's little helper: caffeine.

A set of researchers in the United Kingdom have linked high intake of caffeine to hallucinations.

The study at Durham University determined a high caffeine user (classified as more than seven cups of coffee a day) was three times more likely to have heard a person speak when there was nobody there. It was a small study, using just two hundred students, but the subjects reported seeing and hearing people who weren't there and sensing the presence of people who were dead (no mention of any resemblance to Bruce Willis).

If any of this worries you, have heart: researchers were quick to note that hallucinations are not indicative of mental illness!

So your kids could be driving your crazy . . . but maybe not literally.

Image: Piffe the Penguin (I see a cat in my coffee, please tell me I'm hallucinating again)

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A Mother Stalks Her Young Son’s Crush

Hannah Tennant-Moore — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 21:00:00 GMT

“He did not linger long enough for me to squash him completely into myself….”

The above is not, unfortunately, a sentence from a soft core porn novel. It is an excerpt from a New York Times essay in which a mother describes her obsessive, jealous, and blind love for her nine-year-old son. Thanks to Jezebel for directing me to this gem of a Modern Love piece.

The only thing creepier than the essay’s title—“The Tiny Hand that Robs the Cradle”—is the fact that this tiny hand belongs to a third grader who has a crush on the author’s son. Somebody call a family therapist, stat.

Kate Krautkramer is a teacher at her son Sarvis’ school. When she learns that one of his classmates has scrawled “I ‘heart’ Sarvis” in the bathroom stall, she completely loses her mind. In hopes of discovering the identity of this “little vixen” who was so unforgivably bold as to publicly proclaim an interest in her little boy, the jealous mother turns first to the principal, then to her son’s female classmates, who all “acted innocent in their double braids tied with impossibly pink ribbons.”

With no leads, Krautkramer takes to using the bathroom stall with the Sarvis graffiti every single day. She leans her body against her son’s name and traces the heart with her hand. She comforts herself with the thought that “Graffiti Girl,” as Kautkramer derisively terms her son’s classmate, “didn’t know Sarvis the way I knew Sarvis, no matter what the bathroom wall proclaimed.” But she also torments herself with thoughts of one of Sarvis’s nine-year-old peers “turning her 18-inch hips just so for the very first time, or taking a try at batting her lashes.”

I understand that there is irony at work in this essay. Yet no amount of irony can take away the extreme mortification the author’s son will have to withstand for the rest of his life, now that his mother has publicly confessed not only to having Oedipal urges that would make Freud blush, but also to being clinically insane.

Besides, the irony frequently gives way to disturbingly honest reflection: “I knew it was only an innocent crush, yet I truly lamented that some little girl was pushing my boy into a vaguely sexual consciousness.” Actually, neither Sarvis nor his classmate are displaying any "sexual consciousness." They’re just kids. The mother is the one who sexualizes youth by referring to the girls’ “tiny blue jeans and frilly tops,” and by describing Sarvis’s hair as “brown ringlets” that “hung in heart-stopping whorls down his neck.”

If Kautkramer’s goal is to make sure that her son never marries (or goes on a date), mission accomplished. No girl in her right mind would ever put up with this woman as a mother-in-law.

Photo: New York Times

No dinero for Dina

Brett Singer — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 13:00:00 GMT

What do you call a couple that spent $1 million on lawyers while getting divorced, and the result was that the wife got $100,000, plus $1,075 a month in child support?

You would call them the McGreeveys. (Well, not anymore, they're divorced.)

Yes, Mr. "I Am A Gay American" and the former first lady of the Garden State are finished with their contentious divorce proceeding. NYMag describes the courtroom drama as, "incredibly public, ugly, and drawn-out," which is kind of true, although it didn't quite have the legs of the Christie Brinkley / Peter "19 is legal, dammit!" Cook case.

What's fascinating to me is that Dina is getting almost nothing. She gets a one-time payment of $109,295 from Jimbo, which is half of their shared investments, so it kind of doesn't count in my book. $1,075 a month in child support is, if I may be so bold, bupkis.

So why no dinero for Dina? Jim don’t have no money. NYMag says, "since McGreevey argued that he only makes $48,000 per year while he is in seminary, the judge ruled him 'underemployed.'" So he's studying to be a priest. I guess his book didn't sell as well as people had hoped. Jim is living with a "super-wealthy financier" but those assets don't factor in. ("Jim's in love with a Jersey boy..." OK, don't go there.)

Judge Karen M. Cassidy said that both Jim and Dina, "clearly had agendas," and "their anger seemed to override any ability to testify credibly or to be reasonable." At least she went after both of them, unlike the judge in the YouTube cuckoo-wife case.

I have to wonder how angry you have to be at your spouse to spend $500,000 on attorney's fees - each - when you must have known that there was no pot of gold at the end of the divorce rainbow. Sure, Dina was married to a guy that was sleeping with, well, another guy, so she's mad. And Jim… well, he's mad at her for something, I guess. According to the New York Post, the couple will do some swapping of 401k plans and other relatively minor assets, like a $1500 checking account. She was only asking for $2500/month. So how do you rack up half a mil worth of legal bills? Fuzzy math, at best. They have a daughter together; hopefully they'll be able to deal with each other somewhat civilly.

image/source: NYMag

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What about his taste in women?

Brett Singer — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Remember when Christie Brinkley and Peter "Hey, she was nineteen, that's legal, right?" Cook got divorced, and the judge said that Brinkley needed to "examine her taste in men"?

Well, apparently that doesn't go both ways. In the recent divorce of Shubert Organization honcho Philip Smith and Tricia Walsh-Smith, known to the tabloids as the "Youtube Divorce" because of Tricia's bizarre video rant, there's something I don't recall reading.

What is it? That Smith, 25 years older than his now-ex-wife, needed to examine his taste in women.

If you've never seen the original video, it's posted below. Tricia is, in my unprofessional psychiatric opinion, in desperate need of a good shrink and several thousand Zolofts (not all at once, of course). She makes Peter Cook look like a candidate for Husband of the Year – well, not quite, but you know what I mean. Still, I'm always intrigued when a woman who marries a schmuck somehow has questionable "taste", but a man who marries a loony-tunes just, you know, made a mistake. He didn't know she was crazy.

In other Tricia Walsh-Smith news, she's leaving town because New York is "full of liars," thinks that Kathi Lee Gifford wants to have her killed (which is, to put it mildly, a tad inaccurate), and is just generally a great big pile of crazy. You can read it all on her very own web site.

Image: NYPost

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Is it fair to take pictures of Britney's kids?

Brett Singer — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 01:53:00 GMT

You may have heard about the photographs of Britney Spears smoking while 2-year-old Sean Preston was playing with her cigarette lighter. Well, the actual photo doesn't quite show that. Here it is:

Now, far be it from me to disagree with the celebrity media machine, but this doesn't look as bad as it sounds. In this pic she looks to be taking the cigarettes away from her child. That would be the right thing to do. The better thing to do would be to not smoke at all, and especially not in front of your kids. Second-hand smoke is very dangerous, especially to little lungs. It also makes me wonder if she was smoking while pregnant, which would be much worse. My guess – and I have nothing to back this up – is that she probably was. As a former smoker, I know how hard it is to quit, and it looks to me like the Britster is quite the nicotine addict.

Here's the part that gets me: the photos were taken at her house. Why? Presumably a photog with a mega-ultra-zoom lens – a "Pavarotti", as El Federline famously referred to them on his ill-fated rap album – was suspended from a helicopter or something and took the shot through her window or on her balcony.

She's a celebrity, and over 18 (although emotionally she might be, like, 12, but let's not go there). But her kids aren't. Not to sound like a celebrity defending dipstick ("LEAVE...BRITNEY...ALONE!"), but maybe there should be a law that prevents the kids from being photographed, at least when they're at home. As someone points out over at MomLogic, they didn't ask to be in this bizarre situation.

There are celebrities whose children you almost never see candid pictures of – Madonna, Howard Stern, Christie Brinkley, and I'm sure there are dozens more that I can't think of at the moment. Of course, those people aren't the unbelievable mess that Brit appears to be. At best, this photo shows poor judgment on her part, not only the smoking but also hanging out with her kid in front of an open window where a sleazoid photographer can get a clear shot. Um, curtains? A really high hedge? Move someplace else?

Of course, if nobody wanted to see the pictures, they wouldn't be worth anything, and photographers wouldn't take them. But that's a different topic.

Here are the rest of the photos. Hey, at least she looks pretty good in her bikini.

images: popsugar.com

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Having Crazy-Anxious Dreams About Your Baby?

Karen Murphy — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 11:33:00 GMT

It never failed. No sooner would I finally fall asleep, having nursed my newborn into a blissful milk-induced coma, existing myself in a hazy fog of topsy-turvy day-nights, when I'd have The Dream. Frantic, I'd search everywhere for my baby, rendered tiny amid a tangle of co-sleeping bedsheets, rendered tiny and fragile and...missing. Where? Where? WHERE....!!!?

And then I'd awaken in a milk-stained panic to find that it had only been The Dream and that the baby was still sleeping blissfully beside me, making those incomprehensible and utterly endearing little baby-sounds. It was only a dream. The baby was okay.

I'll bet you've had The Dream, or one like it. Haven't you? It turns out they are quite common, those dreams. A new study in Montreal suggests that such dreams are quite common in pregnant women and new mothers, postulating that pregnancy and birth affects dreams. Well, duh. "In a high number of cases, the dreams are of infants in peril, provoking 'anxiety in the mother that often spills over into wakefulness.'" Yeah. What they said.