The Best News of the Week of 6/29-7/3 | 07/03/2009 11:00 am

wOw Reports: The Best News of the Week – From YOU

Thank you for sharing your compelling stories. Here are just some of the comments that caught our attention …

By YOU!

Dear YOU,

We launched wOw Reports with the hopes of it growing into a new kind of area for what’s happening in your neck of the woods. Please keep the storytelling and the reportage going. Below are some of the comments that caught our attention for its local angle.

Thank you,
The wowOwow Staff

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By Linda Myers on 07/01/2009 6:01 pm

http://www.kmbc.com/video/19908430/
One of our local weathermen, who is also an accomplished musician and conductor had the chance to lead the Morman Tablenacle Choir and I think the video is great!

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By Lila Kuh on 07/01/2009 7:02 pm

In the Washington DC Metro area, another child has died after being forgotten in a locked car for 8 hours in the summer heat. This follows just months after a major story in the Washington Post about the phenomenon, which seems increasingly common. The parents in these cases are vilified even as they must be cursing themselves in a depth of guilt and sorrow we should all hope never to experience; but in all the cases, distraction and a change in routine were all it took to erase the child’s presence from the parent’s mind. The child is with the sitter… at day care… with the other parent… until the horrible truth crashes in, too late. The main question is less about how or whether to punish the parents, and more about what can be done to prevent this from happening.

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By Sylvia M on 07/02/2009 11:27 am

As of July 1, 2009, all restaurants in the state of California with more than 20 stores must display the calorie count of items on the menu. No more excuses of "not knowing"
"It will also bar schools from offering students fries, baked goods and other dishes made with oils, margarine or shortening containing artery-clogging trans fats, and it will prevent high schools from selling students sodas."
and
"The new law will allow high schools to sell students only fruit and vegetable drinks with no added sweeteners, bottled water with no sweeteners, low-fat and nonfat milk, soy milk, rice milk and similar nondairy milks and electrolyte-replacing sports drinks with no more than 42 grams of added sweetener per 20-ounce serving."
http://cbs5.com/local/california.calories.menu.2.1065634.html

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42 Reader Comments (so far…) Sign In or Register to comment

How much control do Americans have over pregnancies, Andrea? Here we go on "that" topic, but … you know what I mean. Women are still socialized to take on too much, period. I’ve often wondered, as busy as I’ve been in my career years with many children, and during grad school when we started our family, how I would have survived living where I do now (SW). On the east coast parks were abundant, and we all walked our babies to the local park at least daily, and around "The Charles" daily, where we met other women, and fathers… and became close friends. We helped one another, with babysitting clubs (I designed one for "MIT-Harvard" group, plus laundry, trading needed furnishings, shopping, and if ever one of us ended up ill or in an ER with one of our children, the "group" always, but always showed up.

Women today have few if any nearby parks, much less apparent social groups to support them away from their original families, plus they work, and leave the babies somewhere else. Yes, we did both, and/or all - higher education, work, and home, but the main option for baby care was one another.

I remember the day my double PhD spouse put one of our babies ‘seats’ on the roof of care with the baby IN IT. That was the last time he touched a child on the way to a car! (He’d left other important things on car tops in the past, and they were "lost" forever.) Now, what if the mothers who’s babies died had been "fathers?"

By C jay on 07/04/2009 4:21 pm

e-mail alert

C jay,

I agree that women take on too much. I really felt sorry for that UCI professor - I did. Put the man in the car and his head switches into career gear. I’m guessing he’s not always thinking about the baby in the seat in the car while he’s driving. His brain’s already thinking about that project he’s been working on.

As for mothers - far too many are too overwhelmed and have too much on their plate. I was lucky. My mom had a child when I was almost 12 and again when I was 15. That gave me first hand experience of how difficult and time-competitive a mother’s life is. I also knew that I wanted to have a career and eventually get married, although I wasn’t at all sure about how I was going to fit having kids into all that. As the years wore on I began my career, then got married, and decided against having children. Having a husband was time consuming enough. I knew having a child meant making compromises I wasn’t sure I could keep. I’m a big believer of, "When in doubt, don’t." Over the years I got the "too bad you can’t have kids" comment from aunts and older friends. [Gee, didn’t they understand that I was happy without kids?] I was always content with my decision and if I had to do it all over again I would do it the same way. For me it was right.

I don’t believe women have a biologically compulsion to have children. I think that so-called urge is just the mind telling the woman that having babies is part of life. Women should not be made to feel that they must reproduce, especially in this day and age when divorces are plentiful. It’s OK not to have kids. Those who DO want to have kids should realize that they have enormous challenges ahead of them and unless they compromise in order to make the baby a priority, then they’re in for a rude awakening. Few women, if any, are supermoms.

I wonder how many of the mothers who left children in cars in the heat really wanted to be mothers.

By Andrea Brandon on 07/04/2009 5:58 pm