The daughter of a judicial candidate in Oklahoma has taken out an ad telling citizens “Do not vote for my Dad!”

Ouch!

Jan Schill, 31, and her husband paid for the quarter-page ad that included a picture of her family and a list of all the times her father, John Mantooth, had been sued.  It included the address of a website the couple started detailing Mantooth’s legal history.

The father and daughter both admit they’ve never had a good relationship, starting, Mantooth says, after his divorce from Schill’s mother decades ago. But the candidate for judge in McClain County said he also sees a little political maneuvering. Schill’s husband’s former law partner is one of Mantooth’s opponents, Greg Dixon.

Dixon isn’t very pleased with family matters intruding on his campaign. Here’s what he told the Associated Press:

“Unequivocally, absolutely not,” he said. “I don’t want to be affiliated with that website or that ad. I don’t want to use it as a platform in my political campaign.”

Awkward!

Every political family has someone, huh?

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A Salt Lake City mom is pregnant with two babies, only they’re not twins. They don’t even have the same due date. The expectant mom, Angie Cromar has two uteruses, a rare condition known as uterus didelphys. She got pregnant with one and then a couple of weeks later with another.

It’s happy news for the 34-year-old and baffling news for her doctors. The chance of her getting pregnant in both uteruses was one in five million. Only 100 such cases of a double pregnancy like Cromar’s are known.

Cromar and her husband already have three children under 8 years old so she was aware of her rare condition. She also knows that this pregnancy isn’t without its risks. The babies could be born at a low birth weight or prematurely. But so far, so good. The fetuses are around 20-weeks along (give or take a week, right?) and they are developing normally.

The Cromars found out about this extremely unusual pregnancy when she went in for an ultrasound. The techs saw one fetus that was five weeks and one day along and then noticed the second, which was more like six weeks and a day.

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Has it come to this? Should parents plan for LDLs along with the ABC’s?

The American Academy of Pediatrics has recommended that young children and teens with a family history of high cholesterol, premature hearth disease and diabetes be screened as young as 2. But a new study published in the most recent issue of Pediatrics says most people don’t have an accurate understanding of what their family’s health history is.

Instead, researchers are recommending all kids be screened. In the study, 20,000 5th-graders in West Virginia were screened through blood tests and family history. Of those, 71 percent met the guidelines based on family history. But nearly 10 percent of those who didn’t know their family history tested for high cholesterol, some of whom required immediate treatment.

Health screening, especially for children, is a great idea. Cost, however, could limit who would get tested, though overweight, obesity, and high diabetes are found in all sectors.

Should cholesterol tests be routinely screened for in young children?

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Cover of Larry Rivers: Art and the Artist

Who has control of the pictures from childhood once the subjects of those pictures are grown adults? It’s not a terribly relevant question for most of us — Mom wants them? She can have them!

But it’s relevant for Emma Tamburlini, the 43-year-old daughter of now deceased proto-pop artist Larry Rivers. Among the questionable gems in Rivers’ collection of photos and film are various interviews with his daughters about their breasts. The New York Times has a story in the Arts section today about the daughter’s desire to get rid of them.

Tamburlini said she was pressured from the age of 11 to do the interviews — naked or without a shirt on, of course — and she would like the film destroyed. When she protested, she was told she was a bad girl. This led to problems in her life and having the films “out there in the world” makes it harder for her to recover.

New York University purchased the film from the Larry Rivers Foundation. NYU has assured Tamburlini that the films won’t be available to the public until both she and her sister, Gwynne Rivers, have died.

But is that good enough? Do the sisters get any say over the photos and films?

Here’s what Rivers’ Foundation director David Joel says:

“I can’t be the person who says this stays and this goes,” he said. “My job is to protect the material.”

Fair enough. Only here’s what NYU’s dean of Libraries, Carol Mandel says:

“If the extent of the restriction currently planned should be greater, we can have conversations with all the interested parties about the handling of this material going forward,” she said.

The story goes on to illustrate another conundrum: people place different values on these things. Some might call Rivers’ work child porn — which Tambrulini seems surprised hasn’t happened yet — while others say it’s no big deal.

So who should make the call? NYU or Tambrulini and her sister? What about those embarrassing pics of you in a tub? Or with your first wife that your mother refuses to take out of the family photo albums? They’re her property. But aren’t they yours too?

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A mother on a three-year family bike trip from Alaska to Argentina is defending her family from the criticism that she’s endangering her sons’ lives in order to live out her own perverted dreams.

Writing for Salon, Nancy Sathre-Vogel argues that her boys could opt out of the trip at any time, that it’s often the young teens who keep the family going, who want to push to finish the trip and also break a world record.

Unlike the Sunderlands, the California family famous for sending off their minor children to sail in small boats around the world — solo — Sathre-Vogel says theirs is a family trip, all of them in it together. They home school the boys, having packed learning materials which apparently get refreshed from time to time.

They’re down in South America somewhere, headed to the very tip of the continent. They started in the very north of Alaska and have been through all seasons, all kinds of weather and many a personal challenge. And they keep going. She has blogged about their travels at familyonbikes.org.

It’s hard to see how anyone could get incensed about their trip. Some critics say that the parents are foisting their dreams on to the boys. That they’ve kept them from their friends and secure and predictable living arrangements, which amounts to some kind of cruelty. I think they’ve given the boys an incredible adventure, kept them from the crappy years of middle school, taught them how to take care of themselves, work as a team, survive without TV, push themselves physically, and how others who don’t have the luxury — the smarts, the money, the ambition — to take off on a three-year bike trip live.

How could they do this to their kids? How could they not!

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All Natasha Wilson and her husband wanted was a boy and a girl. Things were going according to plan for the Buffalo, N.Y., couple several years ago when she gave birth to their first, a son.

Wilson got pregnant again — this time with twins. Two more boys. What the heck, they thought, lets give it another go and see if we can have a girl.

Third pregnancy? Triplets. And guess what?

Three boys.

Natasha Wilson tells KABC News that all the kids — what are they up to, six? — were conceived without fertility drugs and treatments.

No word on whether they’ll stop or try again for a girl. Quadruplet girls would sort of even things out. Then again, they’re still trying to scare up a couple of extra cribs for the triplets. Her husband, the father of all these kids, is out of work.

Maybe they could consult with this incredible mother of triplets for some advice.

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Devi, who was born in 1944, is the oldest woman to give birth to triplets. But she’s not the oldest woman to give birth — not even the oldest woman in India. That claim goes to Rajo Devi Lohan, who was 70 when she gave birth to twins a year and a half ago. Both Devi and Lohan were treated at the same fertility clinic in Haryana, a city in India.

While Devi’s three kids — weighing 2lbs 6oz, 2lbs 4oz and 1lb 7oz — struggle to survive, Lohan is fighting for her life as well, prompting critics to cry out about elderly women becoming mothers.

Just 18 months after giving birth to her twins, she is still suffering from complications after her cesarean section and her refusal to allow herself to fully heal after the birth. Against doctors’ orders, Lohan insisted on squatting to milk the family cow just days after returning home from the hospital, according to the Daily Mail.

As for Devi, she and her husband of 44 years had tried to have children, but couldn’t. The husband eventually took two other wives and neither of them could conceive either. He is ecstatic about the triplets.

What do you think about such old parents giving birth so late in life? Should there be a cut-off age? If so, where do you draw the line … 40? 45? 50? 55? Does it bother you that these families are so poor?

I have three kids and, frankly, can’t blame these people for going through with it. I sometimes think if I hadn’t had kids in my 30s — if that had only become an option for me in my 50s or 60s or, heck, at 70, I’d be the first in line to try and make it happen.

Still, there’s the question of age and kids having to grow up without there parents. Except lots of kids lose their parents early in life. Why should this be any different?

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Sheila Kaplan’s investigation for Salon takes the saying “no good deed goes unpunished” into the baby’s nursery, where chemicals designed to save children from burning in a fire and actually hurting kids more than they are saving their lives.

More than one lab has found that flame retardants, which show up in everything from computers to crib mattresses, are getting into children’s blood and rewiring the brain. Evidence points to these chemicals as potential causes of ADHD, hyperactivity, hearing problems and cancer.

She writes:

In the past 10 years, there’s been an explosion of evidence that the most widely used kind, called PBDEs (polybrominated diphenyl ethers), do more harm than good — especially when used in baby products, which have little chance of bursting into flames. The problem is that the chemicals can flake off the products and land in your baby stroller, your couch, your computer desk and your carpet, ending up being inhaled or swallowed by people and pets.

The EPA is concerned enough about these PBDEs that they’ve put them on a short list of chemicals they want to keep a close eye on.

One chemical, “deca,” was banned a few years ago, but Kaplan writes that chemical companies often change the molecular make-up every so slightly and reintroduce them to the marketplace. There are already 200 new chemicals currently in the works.

I’ve often avoided children’s PJs tagged as flame-retardant — often because they fabric is really hot and doesn’t look like it would breathe well. But I’ve also always wondered if they’re sprayed with something — some chemical — that makes them less susceptible to catching on fire.

In fact, I’m not terribly interested in flame-resistant anything in our house. We don’t smoke and we don’t light candles. And sure, there are other fire hazards but I’m not sure I would trade the off-chance of a house fire with daily/nightly exposure to brain rewiring chemicals.

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I’m fairly certain that when my kids think back on their childhood, they’ll picture me with a blue glow around the back of my head. They’ll have a perfect memory of the top of their father’s head. We are modern parents, which means we also spend far too much time checking mail, updating Facebook and being in the same room with our kids without really being with our kids.

This, two recent articles tell me, is not a good thing. When you connect to one, you can’t connect to the other. Your computer doesn’t care, but your kids do.

The New York Times and Babble (where I am also a contributor) both put up stories this week concluding that being constantly available to our online world is taking us away from our real one. The one with kids.

Researchers worry that parents who spend too much time texting and emailing spending less and less time talking to their kids. Sure, that will close an achievement gap, since smart phone owners AND parents of highly verbal children tend to be wealthier. But that’s hardly the result anyone wants.

Steph Thompson writes this was her moment of reckoning with her crackberry problem:

It was a Saturday, and he and I were walking down the street, ostensibly together. I was answering a text.

My son sighed loudly with an “Uch.” I looked up, innocently.

“What?” I said.

He just shook his head. “You look at that thing more than you look at my face,” he said sadly.

Sound familiar? Ouch!

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Sarah Jessica Parker laid out some ground rules with her two daughters and their nanny. For the next week, they’re not allowed to walk.

It’s an unusual request to make of 11-month-olds, but the mom just doesn’t want to miss the girls’ first steps. She’s heading out on her week-long world tour to promote Sex and the City 2 and has to leave Tabitha, Loretta and 7-year-old son James Wilkie behind.

Like many parents who travel, she’ll stay in touch with the family via Skype. If the girls do decide to pull themselves up at the coffee table and let go, SJP is hoping it will be while they’re all on Skype.

USA Today reports the on the twins’ other tricks:

Tabitha, says Parker, “says ta-ta. And ma-ma-ma. And she tries to say bell, because I have a bell on my necklace. Loretta is just really sweet. She’s crawling. She says hi, hi. Anytime anyone walks in the room, ‘Hi!’ So sweet, first thing in the morning.”

Co-star Cynthia Nixon is dealing with child challenges of her own. Mainly, her 13-year-old daughter who’s pretty miffed she won’t get to go along to Japan.

“My daughter is very upset she’s not going to Japan. She’s Japan-obsessed,” says Nixon. “I told her this is not the way to see it.”

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