Every time some idiot harangues me about why I should quit my job and stay at home with my kids, I think of my mother, who's a nurse. My mom's job saved our family's butt back in the 1980s. When my dad lost his job during the Reagan recession, guess who stepped up to the plate and worked her butt off to keep us in house and home? If my mom hadn't had a decent-paying, full-time job, we'd have been in deep shit.

I have also known a number of women who got hammered financially when their husbands died, became disabled, or deserted them. Why? Because they had not kept their hand in the workplace. The gaps in their resumes and their outdated skills meant that they couldn't find decent jobs, which caused them great hardship.

Work isn't necessarily going to be fun, but guess what? It puts food on the table.

Building "bridges" that let you share your interests with each other is a good idea in any relationship, not just the "beauty and the geek" variety.

McCain is sounding more like poor old Herbert Hoover every day.

Women have always tried to limit their number of children based on whether they could afford to support them -- even without resorting to abortion. There was a huge drop-off in births back during the Great Depression, for instance, and this was when birth control was much more primitive and wasn't easily available; the good economy of the 1950s reversed the trend, inflicting the Baby Boom generation upon us.

Go further back and you have things like child abandonment, infanticide, and sending excess kids away to be servants/prostitutes/workers/religious/farm hands/etc. -- most of which are still going on in various places around the world.

... is that it would apply to anyone who takes a leave of absence, whether it be for illness, accident, taking care of a sick family member, becoming a parent, or whatever.

Wall-E covered most of this ground, and entertained the kiddies while it was at it.

Of course, the cultural critique will be undermined by the inevitable barrage of cheap plastic Chinese toys and fast food tie-ins.

Google only wants to hire people who are willing to make Google the center of their lives. All of the perks like free organic food, concierge services, etc. are intended to keep people on-site, at their desks, loyally working longer hours.

For some reason, though, it doesn't seem to have occurred to them that providing reasonably-priced on-site daycare to Google employees with children is a great way to keep them happily coding away, confident that their offspring are being cared for.

Of course, if Google had taken the opposite route (expanded company-subsidized daycare with its lower-cost provider while eliminating the higher-cost program), they'd have made life a lot easier for the majority of parents in their workforce but everyone with a kid in the higher-priced daycare would have screamed bloody murder. Since this group apparently included highly-placed Google executives, an "affordable daycare for all" plan would probably never have even been considered.

My kids are 10 and 14 and several of my siblings have kids in the 2-5 age range. Boy, have little kid's toys changed over the past decade! My nieces and nephews play with many of the same toys that my sons did at that age. But apart from classic toys (wooden train sets, Legos, etc.), almost all of the new versions of these toys have loud music, singing, flashing lights, more vivid colors -- anything that grabs a kid's attention.

For instance, my older son had a Fisher-Price clock that played a little jingle and prompted him to set the time. The new and improved version has blinking LEDs, music and songs, but still does the same old time-telling quiz. Our Sit-and-Spin was made of yellow plastic; the boys simply sat on it and spun themselves around. The new version has flashing lights and plays music -- and doesn't turn itself off, as I found out when I tripped over it in the dark! Toy cars and trucks now have voices, music, flashing lights and sensors; some of them nag the kid to play with it. Dolls and even teddy bears are going the same route.

Naturally, these bells and whistles are marketed as being "educational" to get parents to buy them. It's no wonder that kids' attention spans seem to be shrinking. I'd be distracted, too, if lights flashed and bells rang every time I tried to play with one of my toys.

The GOP can banish Bush to a non-prime time slot and keep crazy old Uncle Dick away from the cameras all they please. But there's no running away from the fact that they inflicted Bush and Cheney upon America. They OWN them. It is more than fitting to have Bush and Cheney hang around the convention like stinking albatross carcasses around a mariner's neck.

The LW isn't asking for advice about thinness or fatness, she's asking for advice on how to handle rude and obnoxious comments.

Personally, I'd vote for either (a) ignoring the next wack job who tells you that you couldn't possibly have had kids, (b) drowning her in trivial, boring stories as a previous letter writer suggested, or (c) saying "Thank you for sharing" as sarcastically as possible.