This one is funny

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I am flabbergasted by a story coming from Australia, where the local wireless telephone company refused to sell a high end cell phone to a stay at home mother simply because she did not have a regular job outside the home. To add insult to injury, the sales person recommended to this woman to go out there and find a “real job” if she wanted to qualify to purchase the phone.

I am upset, but I am not surprise. More and more every day, society looks at stay at home moms as second class citizens.  They are ridiculed in TV series, they are criticized by the feminist movement and they are not appreciated in general.

How many of us would work 7 days a week, for 12 to 14 hours a day and not receive a single penny in return? How many of us would take a job with no health insurance, no paid vacation, no 1 hour lunch break and no paid sick days? I can assure you not many would do it, yet that is what stay at home moms do every single day. And what do they get in return from society? Nothing but criticism. The feminist movement called them submissive and unliberated, corporation tell us that they are not worthy of owning a cell phone and society tells them they are not successful because they don’t have careers in some big corporations.

Have we gotten to the point where we put more value on the material things than in the value of a family?

As a final note, several women groups are calling for a boycott on the telephone company. Hopefully enough people will join the campaign to make the company change its policy and start valuing what really matter: having a mom at home doing what thy do best, being a mom.

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For the first time ever, my children are not getting any Christmas gifts from us, instead they are giving something to someone else.

It is not because they don’t deserve it, or because we can’t afford it. It is because my wife and I thought it was time to teach them that it is more important to give than to receive.

We know a family in our neighborhood that is going through a really difficult time. The husband recently lost his job and his wife needs to stay home to care for her ailing mother. In addition, 3 of their children have disabilities which mean extra medical expenses for the family. We know that the parents couldn’t afford any Christmas gifts for their children this year, so my wife and I sat down and decided to propose to our children that instead of them receiving gifts from us, the money we would have spent on them be used to buy gifts for that particular family. I was really proud of them when they all agreed with the idea.

If we would have squeezed our family budget a little bid more, we could probably afford buying the gifts for that family along with the gifts for our children, but then my children wouldn’t have to sacrifice anything and they wouldn’t have learned about giving instead of receiving.

The family in question doesn’t know anything about the arrangement and we don’t plan to tell them. We simply invited them to our Christmas dinner where the kids would receive the toys along with the gift my children would receive from other members of our family.

I think this is going to be a very special Christmas, as it would be the first time my children will give instead of receive, and after all that is what Christmas is all about.

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For those parents-to-be who want a baby boy or baby girl, there is a new method to determine whether you are more likely to have a boy or a girl. Scientist from Newcastle University (England) found that men were more likely to have sons if they had more brothers and vice versa if they had more sisters.

They looked at 927 family trees, with details on 556,387 people from North America and Europe, going back to 1600.

While the birthrate is almost 50/50, suggesting that overall men will deliver equal amounts of “X” sperm and “Y” sperm, scientists have suspected that in some individual couples the balance is shifted in favor of either boys or girls. Various explanations have been put forward for this, ranging from differences in the time in the woman’s monthly cycle that sex happens, to the amount of time that sperm spend waiting in the testicles.

The Newcastle study, by Dr Corry Gellatly, is strong evidence that there is a genetic component.  He found that within families, boys with lots of brothers were more likely to have a higher number of sons themselves and those with lots of sisters were more likely to have lots of daughters.

As any other method to pre-determine the gender of the baby, this is not 100% sure, it is just statistically significant (meaning the probabilities are in your favor in the condition applies), but this is very interesting nevertheless.

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