Babble

Frankly, I can't help but wonder why the secret service is using code names if they're going to tell everyone in the world what those names stand for, but if your kids want to play "Protect the First Family," here they are: Barack will be referred to as "Renegade"; Michelle is now "Renaissance"; Malia will be ...

My kids all love(d) Richard Scarry's book, "The Polite Elephant."  And of course I appreciate a cute, appealing book that also tries to teach my toddlers to say "please" and "thank you." My problem with "The Polite Elephant" is that, although it was published in 1998, it feels terribly dated to ...

At what age would you let your child make life-or-death decisions for herself? Is 13 too young? Hannah Jones' parents, Kirsty and Andrew Jones, don't think so.  They support their daughter's decision to reject a potentially life-saving heart transplant, even though doctors felt so strongly that Hannah should get the transplant ...

Australia is facing a critical shortage of doctors, particularly in rural areas, necessitating the hiring of many foreign doctors and nurses.  So, you'd think government officials would be thrilled when one of those doctors, Germany's Bernhard Moeller, applied for permanent residence after working for the past two years at Wimmera ...

You could have knocked me over with a feather when I read about a new study, published in Aesthetic Surgery Journal, that disproves the popular conception that nursing results in sagging breasts - a condition technically known as breast ptosis. The real causes of sagging breasts, according to the researchers, are far less noble:  increased ...

You gotta love gun folks.  You know who I'm talking about - the NRA card-carrying absolutists who hear about an eight-year-old who accidentally killed himself at a gun fair when the UZI he was firing recoiled with such force he shot himself IN THE HEAD, and accuse the Massachusetts state legislator who now wants to pass a law that would ...

A lot of people need help these days.  And when politicans talk about help, they talk about large groups of people:  the struggling middle class, small business owners, students trying to pay for college. But what if you had the opportunity to help just one person?  Is it worth it to spend, say, $30,000 to pull just one person back ...

Lots of us take flaxseed oil, "nature's richest source" of crucial omega-3 fatty acids.  But a new study by the Universite de Montreal's Faculty of Pharmacy and the Sainte-Justine Hospital Research Center should make every pregnant woman shelve the flaxseed oil for the duration of her pregnancy.  Researchers found ...

Given our current economic climate, I guess I shouldn't be surprised that people are looking to downsize.  But I am surprised at how far down some people are sizing, trading in their old houses for abodes as tiny as 100 square feet. CNN recently profiled Bill Kastrinos on their website, a builder who not only manufactures such ...

Everyone knows the first rule of baby naming is, don't set your kids up to be made fun of their entire lives.  Which is why we castigate celebrities for naming their kids Zuma, and Kal-El, Pilot and Apple. But just as important as what you name each individual kid is how your kids' names sound together.  One of my husband's ...