8 is enough...or is it too much?

Did you hear about this family that had 8 babies by cesarean section yesterday? Holy Freakin Crap! And she held them in until 31 weeks!! That's insane! I thought it was crazy enough when the McCaugheys had 7 (or was that the Dillys??). I thought it was insane that Jon & Kate Gosselin had 6 (and twins) that had NO medical issues. This is crazy. I would like TLC to follow up on this lady. I want to know how she kept them cooking for so long.

Amazement aside, I hope that all 8 of those babies are healthy and don't have any long term negative affects from being such high order multiples or from being in the NICU for so long.

I dread hearing all the bad comments about these people. I've see it about other parents of multiples and parents who have numerous children (the Duggars) - being called breeders, saying people weren't meant to have litters, and, my absolute favorite, "vaginas aren't clown cars." Ugh. People are so ignorant sometimes.

In the news

So I read on Cnn.com just now about Chicago opening up Pride Campus - a school of about 600 students with emphasis on it being a safe-haven for gay students, though it is for all students. People are calling it, essentially, a gay school.

I, for one, am happy they are doing this. There is already Harvey Milk High School in New York that is for all students who feel harassed in regular schools, regardless of actual sexual orientation or the specific harassment. I think this is a great thing they are doing - allowing kids who might otherwise drop out or flunk out of school a healthy and safe place to continue their education and get therapy to work through the harassment issues.

Frankly, I don't see a difference in opening this school and having single sex schools. I went to an all girls high school and my brother went to an all boys high school. Overall, I think it did us each a lot of good to have a single sex education. I wasn't distracted or intimidated by boys. Classes weren't disrupted by stupid teenage boys trying to impress their girlfriends. It was a comfortable place to be. Sure, I had my own issues going on, but overall, being surrounded by people like me made school a pleasant experience.

I think every metropolitan area should have some sort of safe haven school. What I see going on around the country in hour high schools (in schools of every class - inner city, parochial, private, boarding, suburban, etc.) is not always happy and makes me want to home school my children. But maybe by the time my kids are school age there will have been improvements or I will live in an area that has a good school, not just academically, but socially as well. But even then, appearances aren't everything.

*edited to add*

Going back to the whole gay thing that started this post - I just don't understand the teaching of hate. I can understand the teaching of religious beliefs and that those beliefs don't necessarily agree that homosexuality is something that is real and needs to be accepted. But I don't understand how you teach a small child to HATE someone because they're gay while also teaching that child that God loves and Jesus saves. That's called being a hypocrite and that's just not acceptable. The Bible teaches us that we are all God's Children, does it not? It teaches us to Love Thy Neighbor, does it not?

I am so glad that my high school religion teacher (I went to Catholic school) was of an open mind and taught us that the Bible is a book of stories, written 200 years after Jesus died. He taught us to believe the principles of the stories, but never to take them at their word. He taught us that the story of Sodom and Gomorrah was a lession in how not to be a whore, but to have respect for yourself and not sleep around, not to be prostitutes. He taught us that not lying with mankind as with man meant not to sleep around, not that it meant that men couldn't sleep together. He taught us to have an open mind and an open heart. Thank you Mr. Garvin.

Too awesome not to share...

On SF Gate's The Poop column today, Peter Hartlaub inquired about your favorite National Anthem performance. He listed Huey Lewis and the News, The Greatful Dead, and Chaka Khan as some of his favorite performances.

Someone named chicagobill posted this comment "...But my favorite performance of all time was at Fenway Park during a game where they were doing awareness of folks with special needs, and a teenage or young adult was to sing. Autistic, I believe. He started laughing in the middle and stopped singing a couple of times, and at a certain point, the crowd took over and sang strongly, and he sang with the crowd, and they applauded like crazy when it was done. This was brought to my attention in one of Bill Simmons's columns for ESPN -- a Yankees fan sent it in, and said it killed him to praise Boston fans, but he had to and hoped that it would go down the same way if the Yankees ever did the same thing."

The crowd's response is awesome. I had to share it.

Here's the video:

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Stories like these make me want to become a social worker.

There just aren't enough social workers out there. They become overwhelmed and simply give up on some of their kids, resulting in those kids deaths. That's just unacceptable. Social workers are all these kids have because their parents neglect or abuse them. When those social workers fail them, they have nothing and no one to help them or rescue them.

Lately I've been just feeling so helpless. I want to help people - I want to help everyone around me and it kills me that I can't do that.