Ben, I take it you have gotten a vasectomy to guarantee you won't add any spawn to this world? Jeanette, my middle DD was in your position, but somehow looks like 3rd time will be a charm for her. We are cautiously hopeful as there is some familial immune thing which hits some members of my mom's family and prevents successful pregnancies beyong the first trimester. She has bounced between intense longing and then dissing people who want to be parents on and off for the last few years. I have two other grandbabies but they live 1200 miles away so this one will be closer in many ways.

As for me, I do understand the bitter with the sweet of being 50+ and knowing the only human babies in my life from now on with belong to other mothers. I also understand the retired brood mare at the stables I sometimes help at looking over the fence at the new mom's with babies and nickering to try to get the foals to come closer. there is just that inborn desire to have and to hold a small being. I was fortunate in that my kids were spaced a good distance apart so i did get to savor a baby as a baby each time, I know I dont have the energy to carry and mother another but I have days.......

Even my husband who doesn't always appreciate pick up humor was laughin at it. We both found it funny, gently informative and were pleased to see an ad about contraception and STD prevention that isn't so dry the people who need to be reached turn it off.

My mother, who was scared a child who preferred Tonka trucks and matchbox cars to Barbies would be too manly to land a husband, started handing me Cosmopolitans at the age of 15. Through all the years of reading them, I got one good recipe for chicken livers in Brioche, learned enough about plastic surgery to decide I never wanted to participate and laughed at the ideas of how to land and please a man. I think I read one or two good short stories.

I am really amazed Cosmo is still alive to continue to push the same pap of 35 years ago. Give me "Living," "Sunset" or other lifestyle magazines not predicated on the idea of seducing a man to take care of one the rest of her days.

My vengeful side remembers stories about Graner's treatment of prisoners on his "civilian" job before he was shipped overseas. Let's just say Graner isn't on my sympathetic list. He is being treated no differently than any prisoner in the country who has the misfortune of being in Administrative Segragation. having friends inside "the system" i know there are far too many guards just like him inside. karma is indeed a beeyotch.

The "all people are humans and deserve a chance to rehab ilitate" side of me is absolutely appalled at Graner's treatment, just as I am about this treatment of far too many prisoners in the US, who will one day be walking the streets I walk on, sicker, more twisted and with fewer copiing skills than when they went in. We should NOT treat people in this fashion. Crimes or not, they are still humans.

Now I do believe Graner is singled out for having been caught. Too bad the people who were giving tacit approval for this treatment are still walking free, ready to makke more graners, and worse probably working in the system making more crazy people to be loosed on the world.

Just about anyone from the Unitarian/Universalist, United Church of Christ, or even most congregationalist churches would have been a far better choice and would have set a much more tolerant tone for the incoming administration. Obama's flirtation with the darker side of Christianity is one of many reaons I was a Hill raiser and it took me almost until the election not behave like PUMA.

Now eveyone else can realize Obama may talk pretty, but walking that talk is a non starter for him. Also Damnit! now my sister in law, who wrote in Hillary Rodham Clinton rather than put a vote down for a man she didn't trust, and my PUMA sister who did vote for McCain rather than pulling a lever for "that untrustworth scoundrel" can start saying "I told you all so!" I can only hope the gay band everyone is touting will develop a last minute case of norovirus and will not be able to be at the back table of this travesty.

i still can't believe my 90 pouhnd friend and I are prescribed the same dosage of drugs when I am at least 2x the woman she is, and my very obese friend is also prescribed the same dose. Veteranarians titrate dose by weight, why can't people docs?

Truly a study that titrates drugs is well past time.