Nerdy Apple Bottom:  My son is gay

Or he’s not. I don’t care. He is still my son. And he is 5. And I am his mother. And if you have a problem with anything mentioned above, I don’t want to know you…

So a few weeks before Halloween, Boo decides he wants to be Daphne from Scooby Doo, along with his best friend E. He had dressed as Scooby a couple of years ago.  I was hesitant to make the purchase, not because it was a cross gendered situation, but because 5 year olds have a tendency to change their minds. After requesting a couple of more times, I said sure and placed the order. He flipped out when it arrived. It was perfect…

And then Mom C approaches. She had been in the main room, saw us walk in, and followed us down the hall to let me know her thoughts. And they were that I should never have ‘allowed’ this and thank God it wasn’t next year when he was in Kindergarten since I would have had to put my foot down and ‘forbidden’ it. To which I calmly replied that I would do no such thing and couldn’t imagine what she was talking about. She continued on and on about how mean children could be and how he would be ridiculed…

But here’s the point, it is none of your damn business.

If you think that me allowing my son to be a female character for Halloween is somehow going to ‘make’ him gay then you are an idiot. Firstly, what a ridiculous concept. Secondly, if my son is gay, OK. I will love him no less. Thirdly, I am not worried that your son will grow up to be an actual ninja so back off.

Cafemom The Stir: Long-Hair Hating Preschool? Hold the Outrage

Poor little Jack Szablewski was supposedly kicked out of preschool for having long hair (gasp!).

To make matters worse, he was growing it out to honor his grandfather who had passed away from lung cancer 16 months earlier. He planned to cut it and donate it to a charity to make wigs for cancer patients.

A sweet gesture and a good lesson for a boy so young? Absolutely.

So how dare a preschool try to wave its tyrannical hand and step in the way of something so good and honorable and just?

Because it was a private school, with a dress code, that clearly stated “boys’ hair must be short and neat.”

Midwifery Today: The Epidural Trip-Why are so many women taking dangerous drugs during labor?

This year, about two million women will get an epidural legally, but hopefully not lethally, in the US. As a result, about eight of them will never walk unassisted again. In Westernized countries, roughly 50–70% of birthing women have epidurals for pain relief. Research on who gets an epidural and why draws a profile very similar to the people who were taking drugs in the ’70s. Most women are getting epidurals because their friends are doing it.(1) In a recent, large study of epidural users, the most often cited factor in deciding to have an epidural was having heard about positive experiences from friends and family.

Today, health authorities tout epidural analgesia as the safest, most effective method of pain relief available for childbirth. You could not pull that off on my generation. We lost enough creative artists—Janis Joplin, John Belushi, Jim Morrison and Lenny Bruce—to injectable pain killers. We are aware of the potential of painkillers that are injected into your body—let alone into the delicate spinal cord—by someone else. We know that epidurals do not compare in safety to asserting the power of mind over body, hypnosis or even group high. Those three involve no danger and are all as effective as epidural anesthesia. Pain, more than any other sense, is open to individual interpretation. This is particularly true when it comes to the pain of childbirth.

Pink News:  ‘Zero per cent’ rate of abuse for children with lesbian parents

A small study of children brought up by lesbian couples found that not one reported any sexual or physical abuse.

The research comes from the longest-running study into lesbian parenting, carried out by the UCLA’s Williams Institute. The study is now in its 24th year…

Not one of the 78 young people said they had ever been physically or sexually abused by a parent or other caregiver.

In contrast, larger studies of American adolescents have found that 26 per cent say they have been physically abused and 8.3 per cent say they have been sexually abused by a parent or caregiver.

Feminist Breeder: Blue Cross Blue Shield Doesn’t Want Me to Homebirth

Before we even started trying to get pregnant again, I told my husband we had to find a homebirth midwife who would take me as a VBAC patient, and one that could accept our insurance.  If we couldn’t find  that, quite frankly, I didn’t want another baby.

If you’re a VBAC mom in Chicagoland, your choices for out-of-hospital birth are essentially limited to one homebirth CNM (possibly two, but for us, only one)  in this area, so we met with her to make sure she was a good fit.  When it came time to think about payment, the deal was sealed when we found out that our midwife takes our insurance.  We couldn’t come out of pocket, so that was immensely important.  We don’t have thousands-of-dollars laying around to pay for a birth, and I only had to pay a $100 copay for my last two births.  Paying thousands, in our situation, seemed like a luxury we simply could not afford.  It was a deal-breaker.  Right now we have one steady income that doesn’t cover the bills, and the rest of our expenses are (barely) covered by the combination of scholarships, grants, and loans I get from school.  We confidently chose this midwife knowing that our expensive insurance would handle the payment that we couldn’t.  This is why we pay for insurance, hello?

Then, we found out that coverage we signed up for last year isn’t the coverage we actually have now because they keep decreasing it every year, and it’s going to get even worse in 2011.  Starting in January, almost NONE of our homebirth expenses will be covered because of a massive deductible increase, and what is covered will cost us a ton more than we anticipated when we made the decision to start trying to conceive last January.