If you’re sick of LOLcats, then how about LOLbabies?There’s a funny thread of posts on Offsprung where parents tweak a baby photo using a version of babytalk pidgin aka LOLcat.LINK: offsprung 

These personalized nesting dolls are the ultimate gift for that mom who has everything. Just send illustrator Trisha Krauss a full-length photo of your family (up to five members) and she will hand-paint their likenesses on a custom set of Russian Matrioska nesting dolls.

It’s the ultimate family portrait - only better - because they’re so compact and portable.
Available at MaxwellSilverNY.com 

This has to be the most frightening commerical I’ve ever seen. I was watching Dora The Explorer with my boys when a commercial for this doll - Chou Chou - My First Tooth came on. 

Aside from the cheesy production values and the annoying music, when you pull the pacifier out of its mouth, its bottom teeth just pop up with the obligatory “Ding!” sound effect and the sparks glint off its shiny teeth like a bad toothpaste commercial. It’s scary as hell.

Jonah (my 6-year-old son) and I jumped back in horror and just started screaming. Meanwhile, Asher, my 18-month-old backed away from the television, shaking his head and repeating, “No, no, no, no, no!” over and over. We just didn’t know what to do with ourselves until our collective panic attack faded away.

This is almost as bad as those creepy re-born dolls that are popping up all over ebay. Whatever happened to cute little baby dolls? Why does every doll on the market look like the denizens of the Village of the Damned?

Admit it, the day is always a little brighter when you get to enjoy a laugh at someone else’s expense. Especially if that someone annoys you. The hard-working geeks at ThinkGeek.com are selling the Phantom Keystroker so you can discreetly torture/prank/exact revenge/enact karma on your unwitting victim.

This device hooks into any open USB port on your mark’s computer and it looks like a harmless circuit board. But this torture device emulates a mouse and keyboard and will randomly type out odd garbage text and phrases.

Sit back and revel in glee as your victim grinds their teeth and spends their afternoon on the phone with tech support, trying to rid their computer of a non-existent virus.

LINK: ThinkGeek.com

Celebrities aren’t the only ones who saddle their offspring with truly terrible names. The genealogy website, Ancestry.com, shares its list of thousands of shockingly horrible baby names given to real people, as recorded by the U.S. Census Bureau.

Names like “Tiny Hooker” and “Harry Pitts” or “Wanna Towell” sound apocryphal, but according to “Bad Baby Names” by Michael Sherrod and Matthew Rayback of Ancestry.com, they’re real baby names.

Here’s a just a few baby names inspired by Diseases:

Fever Bender (born 1856)
Leper Priest (born 1929)
Cholera Priest (born 1830 during the second cholera pandemic)
Rubella Graves (born 1814)
Typhus Black (born 1897)
Hysteria Johnson (born 1881)
Emma Royd (born 1850)
Kathryn E. Coli (born 1894)
Mumps Sykes (born 1891)

How sick is that?

For more, check out the link below.

Think you can top this list with your own bad baby name? Everybody knows someone with a really f-ed up name, why don’t you humiliate them further by sharing it here?

LINKS: MSNBC and Ancestry.com

Housework just isn’t my bag. That’s why I’m forever looking for ways to cut corners and multi-task. Luckily, I have a weekly housekeeper who does most of my heavy lifting. But the day-to-day tasks of picking up after two boys falls on my lazy and reluctant shoulders.

When I saw these slippers on the awesome blog, Neatorama, I wondered how this could possibly be any less work than using a Swiffer or a dust mop? If you have short legs and small feet like me, this is like double the energy expenditure! Right now, I can stand in a stationary position and just stick the long Swiffer stick under chairs, cabinets and other nooks & crannies. With these slippers, I’d have to make like a short track speed skater around my kitchen. It wouldn’t kill me to burn a few more calories, goodness knows, but this is antithetical to the lazy yet insanely busy mom’s credo of doing the bare minimum.

Worst of all, why don’t they make these slippers in children’s sizes? At least with small children you can scam them into believing they’re doing something fun - you know that old whitewashing Tom Sawyer’s fence trick. Plus, instead of throwing away the used Swiffer cloth, you actually have to wash and dry these slippers - which means adding to the never-ending laundry pile.

LINK: Solutions.com

I’ve always been bemused by the term MILF (Mom I’d Like to F*ck). I know many women who consider it a compliment and aspire to MILFdom from the moment their pee stick shows those double pink lines. But I think that being called a MILF is actually a backhanded compliment - a very condescending example of damning with faint praise.

I’m not going into a political feminist rant about men objectifying women, because let’s face it. We all want to be considered hot and desirable by the opposite sex or the same sex (whatever your preference) and that’s natural and normal. My problem with the term is that it divides Moms from the rest of the women. And the attractive moms, the so-called MILFs, are further culled from the frumpy, maternal masses.

To be considered a MILF is to imply that you’re an exception to the unspoken rule that Moms are generally undesirable and unattractive. It’s like saying, “Hey, you’re pretty hot….for a mom. But you’re still a mom so don’t let all this sexiness go to your head. Because you’re still not as hot as the Non-Moms.”

Gee, thanks a lot!

Either a woman is attractive or she’s not. Period. End of Story. Why do we need qualifiers that put moms in a separate leper colony? Even my female friends do this unintentionally. Before I had children, I never lacked for male attention or dates. Three pregnancies later, I think I actually look better now than I did in my twenties. My facial baby fat has melted away, revealing cheekbones for the first time in my life and I still wear a size 2. But almost everybody who greets me will say something along the lines of “Oooh, look at you hot mama!” or “Hey sexy mama!”

As soon as I became a mother, I crossed that invisible divide and all compliments about my appearance are faintly patronizing when you throw in the Mom label with every adjective. It’s like being patted on the head and being told, “Ah, bless her little heart. She still thinks she’s got it going on.”

And as for male attention, well, from my experience, a baby is the ultimate cloaking device. Men simply stopped seeing me if I had my kids with me. But if I was out without them, I was back on the radar. So, it’s little wonder that us moms are desperate for any validation that we haven’t lost our mojo. I totally get it.

But I’m not so worried that I’m past my prime that I’m willing to settle for a former porn term that reeks with condescension and try to convert it into a compliment either.

The terms are interchangeable as far as I’m concerned: Hot Mom, Yummy Mummy, Cougars, Pumas - whatever.

So what do you think? Do you consider MILF a compliment or not?

Random celebrity sightings are the urban equivalent of birdwatching - both thoroughly useless hobbies with zero skill involved. Yesterday, while I was going about my mundane mom-centric errands, I had two random celebrity encounters.

The first was kind of surreal and strange since it occurred in the product section of my neighborhood Ralph’s grocery store. I don’t know what it is about this particular suburban Ralph’s, but between my husband and I, we have seen Nicole Ritchie surrounded by paparazzi, Justin Timberlake and Allison Janney - just to name a few.

Yesterday, while I was picking out some Gala Apples and bagging them, a loud male voice boomed right behind cheerfully, “Well, hello there!”

I jumped out of my skin and whirled around and saw Jon Voight beaming at me and holding a grocery basket on his elbow. He was wearing a buttoned up checked shirt topped with a fancy Dad sweater (you know, the long buttoned up cardigan type). Neatly pressed grey slacks and black loafers. Immaculately dressed in a professorial way. I just gawked at him, speechlessly for a moment before stammering “Um…hi.”

He glanced over at my grocery cart which was brimming to overflowing and commented, “Now that’s what I call shopping! You’ve got a lot of stuff in there. That’s what I like to see, a healthy appetite!” He laughed jovially.

I just stood there staring at him thinking, “Why the hell is Jon Voight (C-list movie star and estranged father to Angelina Jolie) all up in my grill about my shopping cart? Did he just imply that I’m a big fat pig?!”

I glanced into his basket which only had a couple of oranges and a tomato. A grocery basket speaks volumes about a person. He’s clearly health-conscious since he eats fruit and fresh produce. He looked very fit and trim for his age. But he clearly lives alone because he shops like a single person.

I suddenly felt self-conscious about the ridiculous amounts of food in my cart and felt annoyed that I should feel self-conscious about having a broader diet that encompasses more than caffeine and cigarettes. Besides all this food wasn’t just for me!

“Well,” I replied lamely “I have two kids and what can I say, they eat a lot.”

At the mention of my kids, his eyes just glazed over and his smile froze into a polite grin and he turned his scrutiny towards a pile of red delicious apples. I finished up my produce shopping and pushed my overloaded cart towards the checkout. He was still picking out apples with an almost obsessive-compulsive care. He scrutinized each apple and if it wasn’t as flawless and perfect as Snow White’s poison apple he put it back. For all I know, he could still be there.

Later that afternoon, I was taking a tour of a potential summer camp in the Santa Monica mountains above Brentwood. I spotted Jeanne Tripplehorn in my tour group wearing jeans, blazer and delicate pair of aviator sunglasses. Even with a ponytail and shades she was instantly recognizable and effortlessly gorgeous with minimal makeup. Seeing her just confirmed that this camp was definitely going to cost more than my first year of tuition at Cal Berkeley.

Is choreplay the new foreplay? According to Parenting.com’s Sex After Baby Survey, 15% of the female respondents said that the sight of seeing their hubby helping out around the house got them in the mood.

For these women, the book, Porn For Women, will definitely get them all hot and bothered. This photo essay book by Susan Anderson features attractive men getting their domestic duties on with little captions.

Personally, seeing my husband doing domestic chores doesn’t make me hot, but it does make me melt. But nothing makes me mushier than seeing my hubby taking care of the kids. That’s why Porn for New Moms is more up my alley. Seeing my husband be a tender, devoted father makes me love him in a way I didn’t think was possible. Too bad I’m too sleepy to get through the entire book. Maybe any book dedicated to new moms should have a bottle of NoDoze enclosed.

If I were to write a compilation of porn for moms, it would have page after page of beautiful beds with fluffy pillows and sheets of 800 thread count Egyptian Cotton.  Maybe that’s why I always flip through the Company Store catalogues with that goofy grin on my face and a dribble of drool.

LINKS: amazon.com and Parenting.com

A creepy little gnome has been terrorizing local children in a small town in the province of Salta, Argentina according to The Sun newspaper online.

A group of youngsters with a mobile phone filmed this strange little midget with a sideways shuffle-walk emerging from the grass at one o’clock in the morning and were so terrified that one of them had to be hospitalized.

At the link below, you can see the video for yourself. There’s a long preamble of a group of people just standing around and chit chatting in Spanish until the gnome emerges from the grass and someone lets out a terrified shriek and the video stops abruptly. Despite the comedy of hearing a teenage boy shrieking like a little girl, the video gave me the chills.

So what do you think? A hoax executed by some bored teenagers or a drunken idiot with a traffic cone on his head?

If it is a hoax, someone’s been inspired by the creepy midget running through the streets of Venice in Don’t Look Now.

Only a shuffling, sideways crab walking midget is WAAAAY scarier than a running midget.

LINK: TheSun