Bill O’Reilly recently attacked Jennifer Aniston because of her new movie The Switch, about a single woman deciding to have a baby using a sperm donor and not with a man who would be a father to her child. While promoting the movie, Jennifer Aniston commented on the movie’s premise, saying:
“Women are realizing more and more that you don’t have to settle, they don’t have to fiddle with a man to have that child. They are realizing if it’s that time in their life and they want this part they can do it with or without that.”
Many have been commenting on what the movie is really saying about society, but this commentary goes back as far as when other movies of the same type came out; movies like like Baby Mama and Miss Conception. But one person in particular had quite the negative reaction to Aniston’s comments about women having children without fathers being in the picture; and that person is none other than Bill O’Reilly.
O’Reilly is under the impression that Jennifer Aniston is some gigantic role model amongst children and commented saying, “She’s throwing a message out to 12-year-olds and 13-year-olds that, ‘Hey you don’t need a guy. You don’t need a dad.’ That is destructive to our society.”
When I heard about this comment, the first thing I thought of was “Why would 12 and 13-year olds need a guy in the first place? At that age, you kind of want them to stay far, far away from guys”, but perhaps he just meant that Jennifer Aniston is out there saying that kids don’t need any kind of male figures in their lives whatsoever. Even so, that’s a pretty big slip up on O’Reilly’s part. Secondly, what 12 and 13-year-olds know who Jennifer Aniston is or what she is doing or what movies she is in? I really don’t think they care much about Jennifer Aniston and I was assured in my thought about this when Beth Feldman of Role Mommy came out and said the same thing.
But let’s get down to the real point of this topic–Do children of single mothers suffer more than if they were brought up in a household with a father present?
“The traditional family that we have always known as mom, dad and two kids is no longer the traditional family. … Children of single parents do just as well as kids who have two parents. There’s nothing in the research that says having a baby by yourself is a terrible thing.”
Carl Pickhardt, a parenting expert and psychologist also commented on where Bill O’Reilly’s comments were coming from and what to take away from them, saying that while fathers are important in a child’s life, what it is even more important and downright crucial is “the quality of parental commitment to raising that child after it is born. … It is a prejudice that single parents — mostly moms — are deficient parents. In fact, they are among the strongest and most resourceful parents I see.”
Child expert Wendy Toone offers fun ways to expand your child’s mind during the dog days of summer.
We may be in knee deep in those lazy, hazy days of summer, but that doesn’t mean we still can’t keep our kids active with challenging games and activities that will keep their minds buzzing. In fact, here are some great rainy day and car ride activities that will challenge your kids to think on their feet!
1. Mind games can keep boredom away as well as physical activity. Even small children can follow an adjusted version of “I Spy.” Just be sure that the clues are age appropriate and not too tricky. Look for easy to spot shapes, bright colors, or unique characteristics (animals, common objects such as pencils, etc.). Remember to let them give you the clues, too, to really work their brains. Finding an object is different than coming up with a clue for an object.
2. Once your child is a little older, around 4 years or so, theme games can be played. A favorite (still) of my kids is the animal game. “I Spy”-like clues can be given, but your child must rely on their memory and knowledge of animals instead of looking for pictures or representations of them. These types of games are great for long car rides, and you can make them more challenging, as your children get older. Go in order through the alphabet…”I have a long nose and tongue” = Aardvark (or anteater, both will work in this case); “I’m totally white and live in the cold” = Beluga whale. Get it?
3. READ, READ, READ. Reading to your child, no matter how young, increases their vocabulary, imagination, and overall cognitive abilities. Hearing language creates synapses – the connection of brain cells. Most of us parents think that reading at bedtime is sufficient. And while bedtime stories create a wonderful bonding time between parent and child, so can reading a story with your child snuggled on your lap in a waiting room. Granted, you can’t be expected to tote a small library around with you at all times. But if you know your day will include a little waiting time, why not pop your child’s favorite book in the day bag. Or maybe a story you haven’t yet read to them? Or take advantage of digital children’s books that can be downloaded to your cell phone or iPod? These digital books can do double duty, as oftentimes they are books that are enhanced with narration (sometimes even music and sound effects are added), so your little one can hear the book as they see the words on your phone or iPod screen.
So the next time you find yourself exasperated trying to tame the savage beast that is a toddler with nothing to do, try a few of these tips. Not all of them will work at all times or in every situation. But hopefully if nothing else, it will spark your creativity to engage your child and use your waiting time as teaching time. For there is no better teacher for a child than his or her own parent. Good luck!!!
Wendy Toone is a child expert having owned and operated a leading franchise children’s fitness center and now producing MobiStories, Digital Books for KidsTM, as well as being a mom to her two children. To experience the world of digital children’s picture books, visit www.mobistories.com.
To download a free copy of Mommy’s High Heel Shoes for your PC or Mac, visit MobiStories.com and enter the promo code: MHHS0710. The offer expires 8/22.Mommy’s High Heel Shoes is also available for download as an app via the iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad in the iTunes store where you can check out more great story apps from MobiStories: To order a hard cover copy of Kristie Finnan’s book, Mommy’s High Heeled shoes, visit her at KristieFinnan.com.
*This advertorial post is sponsored by the Role Mommy Writers Network.
It is always wise to keep the possibility of a zombie invasion open; it’s usually the people who don’t believe in zombies that are the first to be eaten. To make matters worse, they’re not only eaten, but devoured by the people they thought were their friends; and perhaps they were friends, before one couldn’t help but stalk their friend down and start feasting on their meaty arm.
Luckily, there is now an iPhone app that could possibly save your life in the case of a zombie attack. Max Brooks’ bestselling book The Zombie Survival Guide is now a free iPhone app.
The Zombie Survival Guide Scanner is an app from the Crown Publishing Group that uses the iPhone’s rear camera to take a picture of someone and “scan” their face to illustrate their infection rate. After all, it’s the people you know the best who are always trying to convince you that they’re not infected and then before you know it, they’re trying to eat you. With this app, you just scan their face and see if they’re truly an uninfected human who needs to accompany you out of town, or if you need to shoot them in the head.
All joking aside, this app is hilarious and will keep you occupied for hours, especially if you walk down a busy street and snap pictures of random people and see them get zombiefied right on your phone. It’s great to see more businesses, in this case Crown Publishing Group, developing apps that will go over huge in order to use it as a marketing tool to help build a book’s fanbase.
Within just the past year, it seems as if we have experienced more severe weather and natural disasters than anyone can remember happening over the past decade. Also, more now than ever before, you cannot predict where severe weather will strike because the weather isn’t making much sense as of late. I live in Northeastern, Pennsylvania and just last week we had two tornado warnings and an actual tornado. That doesn’t happen in Northeastern, Pennsylvania; it has been pretty unheard of, but last week there it was, all over the news with headlines practically jumping off the page about how tornadoes do not happen here and yet, there it was.
It’s important to remember now that natural disasters can affect you wherever you live and it’s important to make sure you’re prepared if you are affected. That is what PLAN!T NOW hopes to help people do. Their mission statement:
“PLAN!T NOW advocates the empowerment of people through information and connection, and creates dialogue between people living in hurricane- and severe storm-affected areas and those who prepare coastal regions of the United States, Mexico and the Caribbean to withstand those storms. Operating with the understanding that no matter where you live, a natural disaster can happen at any time, PLAN!T NOW advocates the power of preparedness.”
Morgan Freeman, whom has come to be called The Great Narrator of Everything in this house, has recently been worked in coordination with PLAN!T NOW to help educate people on how to be better prepared when faced with the threat of hurricanes and tornadoes and how preparedness could help save us from untimely death and terrible destruction. He recently filmed a CNN video to raise awareness about being prepared for severe weather, a video that is incredibly timely as the threat of Tropical Storm Bonnie, what is now being called a Tropical Depression, targets to affect the Gulf Coast and could trigger an immense amount of damage.
Check out Morgan Freeman’s short video below and visit PLAN!T NOW to learn how to prepare yourself for natural disasters and how to support their cause.
Queen Latifah is a fabulously respected, savvy businesswoman. She is an Oscar-nominated actress, a Grammy winner, a Cover Girl, and a self-made entrepreneur. She has been an inspiration to many women and young girls throughout the years as she has proven time and again that you can become a successful woman without compromising yourself or your standards in order to fit into some magic mold society insists you must fit into.
Queen Latifah has been a positive role model when it comes to body image and body acceptance. That in itself was the reason why I was excited to read her newest book, Put on Your Crown. The book, she says, is “a wake-up call to empowerment”, written predominantly for young women after noticing the severe lack of self esteem held by young women, which she believes is an epidemic throughout the US. She wrote this book for those young women who need to know that as you learn and grow from the experiences of your past, you can use them to turn yourself into a strong, confident woman.
Put on Your Crown is not a typical self help book. It is not a book of pages upon pages of bullet points on how to miraculously find self confidence and start treating yourself like a queen. It is not written in a tone that screams “I’m a professional and I have all the answers, so listen to me and your life will become awesome!” While it could be classified as a self help book, the premise of Put on Your Crown has to do with moments in our lives that essentially make us who we are and how to take those moments and, regardless of how devastating or surreal, use them to better our lives and appreciate what we have in our lives.
Queen Latifah shares pivotal moments in her own life that fall under one of eight topics, which she has set up as chapters throughout her book. The moments range from the way her parents had treated her and her brother the same without leaving one of them left out, to the openness of her family and their unwavering support throughout her life, to finding out who her true friends were after she had become a celebrity, to the times she worked herself too hard and had burnt out when she was trying to launch her recording studio and then again when she had to appear for photographs and interviews, to becoming very wealthy and suddenly finding out she had gone completely broke, to going to see her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and to the sudden and tragic death of her brother. These moments, as well as many others that have shaped Queen Latifah into the woman she stands proud as today, are listed under the categories of success, beauty, money, love, fear, loss, strength and joy.
As she reflects on her past and the moments she has had in her life that have made her who she is today, she lends not only the stories of these moments to the reader, but also advice and compassion. Essentially, this should have been a great book for young women. The premise of the book is good, the morals of her stories are fantastic and she does touch upon very important topics, such as drugs, prostitution and violence breaking out everywhere in her hometown and telling her readers about her mother, who is also her best friend, who has always been a teacher and who has also committed herself to helping young people who were plagued by drugs and violence and has helped them. Realistically, I found this book to be filled with tiny, redeeming morsels among a book that, as a whole, I found dry, repetitive and boring. The hardcover edition of this book is small and at 197 pages where, if it were laid out in a standard 8×11″ book would make up even less pages, was pretty painful to get through. While I don’t have too much time to sit down and read a book to begin with, I could easily get through something of this size in a few days. Instead, Put on Your Crown took me a month to read and most of that time I spent staring at the book when I did have time to sit down with it, willing myself to pick it up and keep on reading.
I can definitely appreciate the tone of her book; it was not written by a psychologist or a trained professional, but straight from the source. Queen Latifah writes solely in her own voice, as you would imagine she would speak to someone who was talking to her in-person. While I typically enjoy what Queen Latifah has had to say in the past (not including her recent comment about how we need to stop “beating up” Chris Brown, of course), I think this book would have made a better blog–something a great deal shorter. I do not think that she had enough content to fill a book with, since I found her going back to the same stories, anecdotes and scenarios several times throughout the book and it got boring pretty fast.
Despite my boredom with Put on Your Crown, I was looking for something specific within its pages. I wanted her to elaborate more on body image and body acceptance. As a full-figured woman who has actually made a career for herself in Hollywood, she is widely seen as a role model for young women who has not given in to society’s need for thinness. Very early in the book she dedicated a section of her book to the topic, that topic being entitled Real Women Have Curves. She speaks about the pressure to lose weight that she felt throughout her career, frequently being told to lose weight by studio executives, but she had remained adamant on keeping her figure. As long as she was healthy, she liked her size. End of story. That is the Queen Latifah I was looking for. On the second-to-last page of her book, she erased that entire section on how much she liked the size she was and didn’t want to lose weight. In writing to her 19-year-old former-self, she writes, “Dana. Do you know who you are? Guess who you get to be! And guess what, you even get to lose weight!”
I’m sorry, but excuse me? Did I read that correctly? Wait, I went back and looked and yes, I did! For a woman who has solidified herself as a champion of body acceptance to end an entire book she has just written on that note is not only a letdown; it is absolutely devastating for any young woman who feels she is not pretty enough or thin enough and picked up this book thinking it would be something different.
It seems as if Barnes & Noble and Amazon may have a price war going on. Barnes & Noble recently released a WiFi-only Nook for $149 while slashing the price of the full-featured WiFi + 3G Nook to just $199.
Amazon caught wind of the new price-adjustment of the Nook and acted accordingly–by dropping the price of the Amazon Kindle e-reader from $259 to $189, undercutting the Nook by $10 and reclaiming their position as the most affordable e-reader on the market.
According to Consumer Reports, the Amazon Kindle is not just the most affordable e-reader, it also ranks the highest in terms of performance, readability and portability, beating out nine other competitor e-readers including the Barnes & Noble Nook, the Apple iPad, Sony’s Daily Edition and Touch Edition, among others.
With the $70 price drop, will you be going out and purchasing a Kindle?
The first season finale of Glee aired just days ago and some may already be going through withdrawal. If these Glee superfans are between the ages of 10 and 16, they may not have to wait until the premiere of the second season to get their fix.
The Fox show has become a crazed sensation and had attracted an amazing fanbase. The show seems to appeal to just about every age group that can appreciate choir-style singing and choreographed dance numbers. In response to the Glee craze, summer camps across the country are offering children the chance to learn song and dance routines from the popular show.
Camp Glee is taking place in several areas across the country, like St. Charles Community College in Cottleville, Mo. that is open to kids ages 10 to 16. The four sessions they have offered are already filled and even more children are on a waiting list for the program. You can also register for Camp Glee at the Charlotte Academy of Music in Matthews, N.C. and at Kindermusik Arts Center in Croften, Md.
With about 10 million kids attending summer camps in the US every summer, this is definitely a profitable market for the programs and they are currently charging anywhere between $149 for one week to $450 for two weeks.
Glee summer camp has already beaten out another session based on Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series, where children impersonate a character from the story and create alternate endings in the plot.
For fans who don’t fit into the 10 to 16 age group or who may not be attending summer camp this season, Little Brown Books for Young Readers has something to keep the Glee withdrawal at bay. A series of five authorized books based on the hit show will begin rolling out starting September 1st, starting with (naturally) The Beginning, a prequel to the show that will come out in time for the premiere of the show’s second season.
Forget bringing your children to playdates, it’s time for a mommy playdate! Good Vibrations is holding an after-hours mixer at their San Francisco store!
During the mixer, moms will learn how to put the spice back in their sex lives after having children. Women who attend the event will enjoy a “Mommi-tini”, get a personalized store tour and one-on-one consultation with Dr. Carol Queen. You can enter to win a Good Vibrations Sexy Starter Kit, meet the author of Mominatrix and enjoy a complimentary makeover and chocolates. There will also be a special Mommy discount on items at the store, so you definitely don’t want to miss out on that!
The after-hours mixer will be held at Good Vibrations on Tuesday, May 4th from 7:00 to 9:00PM. The address of the store is 1620 Polk Street (at Sacramento Street). If you need directions, check their site.
This isn’t the only event being held at Good Vibrations, so be sure to keep them on your radar and visit the Good Vibrations website to find out what events are being held at all four of their stores.
Good Vibrations has come out with something thoroughly awesome recently that is sure to excite all the sexy mamas out there. The brand new Good Vibrations Sexy Mama resource site contains all sorts of intriguing, eye-opening and absolute must-see/read/have information just for parents–because moms need to take some time out for themselves while they’re working hard caring for their families every day.
What is really great about this blog is that it is completely inclusive. Every single mother can relate to something that has been written and if a topic you’re interested in or looking for hasn’t been written about, why not write about it from your first-hand experience? Good Vibrations is currently looking for sexy mamas to contribute articles to the blog and have even come up with a few topic suggestions in case you’re very interested in contributing but are stuck for an idea. Some possible topics include:
How pregnancy and motherhood affected your sexuality
Humorous moments in talking to your kids about sex
Who are your Sexy Mama Role Models?
The challenges of balancing a sex life with having kids
If you’d like to contribute to the Good Vibrations Sexy Mama Blog, email your submissions to submissions@goodvibes.com.
This resource site will definitely give you pointers, ideas and support to continue being the awesome sexy mama that you are. They can also provide you with the tools to unleash that sexy goddess in you because remember, Good Vibrations is a provider of sex education and sex positive products.
I recently had the opportunity to review the recently-published memoir, Foxy, by the ever-fabulous Pam Grier. Whether you know her from her roles in Coffy, Foxy Brown, Jackie Brown or Showtime’s The L Word, chances are, you have heard of Pam Grier and you have marveled at her ability to truly become the character she is portraying, either in film, television or even in theater.
Pam Grier didn’t come from a wealthy or already-famous family; she was raised in very modest surroundings in Colorado, her father was serving in the Air Force and she was moving around every two years at a time where segregation was at an all-time high. She had a dream to go to college and while trying to earn a living in California, where she had moved to attend UCLA film school and to become an actress. It is only because of her determination and extremely hard and merciless work that Pam Grier is the recognizable and admired woman she is today.
Now is your chance to get to know the Pam Grier you may have not known before and to get an intimate look inside her childhood, her upbringing and the road she traveled to move up within the entertainment industry. We have 5 copies of Foxy to give away thanks to the Hachette Book Group.
To win a copy of Foxy by Pam Grier, all you have to do is leave a comment telling us what movie or television show you loved seeing Pam Grier in. [REQUIRED]
Since Pam Grier has been appearing in film and television since the early 1970′s, this shouldn’t be too hard of a challenge and if you need some help jogging your memory, check out her entire portfolio on Internet Movie Database.
Additional Entries: [Leave a separate comment for each additional entry.]
Leave a comment telling us why you want to win a copy of Foxy.
Blog about this giveaway and about Foxy with a link back to this post and to our full book review.
Tweet about this giveaway. Feel free to use the following pre-written tweet or write your own and leave a comment with a link to your Twitter status.
Win a copy of Foxy by Pam Grier from @WomanTribune: http://tinyurl.com/2ecdloa 5 winners! ends 5/5
This giveaway ends Wednesday, May 5th at 11:59PM EST. This giveaway is open to all US and Canadian residents over the age of 18. The winners will be contacted by email and have 48 hours (2 days) to respond with their mailing address. If I don’t hear back from the winners within that time, another winner will be selected.
Sexuality is something to be celebrated and explored and we hope to help you do just that with the articles and reviews we publish in our love and sex category.
Bill O’Reilly recently attacked Jennifer Aniston because of her new movie The Switch, about a single woman deciding to have a baby using a sperm donor and not with a man who would be a father to her child. While promoting the movie, Jennifer Aniston commented on the movie’s premise, saying:
