Steve’s instincts were incredible. It’s nice to know that millions of people have watched this precious moment between a dad and his daughter. But remember that moment would have been JUST as important to his 3 year old daughter, Emily, if NO ONE else had witnessed it.

Love your kids.

(If the video doesn’t work for you it can be found here: Great catch by a great dad)

CONCLUSIONS: Our findings indicate that paternal depressive symptoms during pregnancy might be a risk factor for excessive infant crying. This finding could be related to genetic transmission, interaction of a father with lasting depressive symptoms with the infant, or related indirectly through contextual stressors such as marital, familial, or economic distress.

My conclusion: Unless you want to be really depressed dad, be positive and upbeat during your wife’s pregnancy!

Link to report: Pediatrics

SOURCES: Mijke P. van den Berg, M.D., Ph.D., Departments of Psychiatry/Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; Jon Shaw, M.D., professor and director, child and adolescent psychiatry, University of Miami Miller of School of Medicine, Miami; July 2009 Pediatrics

Here are the top 10 search terms among kids for the period from February through July:

1. YouTube
2. Google
3. Facebook
4. Sex
5. MySpace
6. Porn
7. Yahoo
8. Michael Jackson
9. Fred
10. eBay

Source: CNET

So there you have the bad news…. Now the good:

Symantec’s OnlineFamily.Norton service is FREE, at least through the end of 2009. You can learn more about the service and download your copy here: OnlineFamily

An alarming 44 percent of Internet users said they were “sometimes” or “often” ignored because another member of the household spends too much time online. Barely behind the 48 percent that said they were ignored because others spend too much time watching TV.

While these survey results aren’t surprising, they are a bit unsettling. For years our kids had to compete with our work, our friends, our TV time, and now they have to compete with the never-ending World Wide Web and all that it offers. How do you react when your wife or child approaches you while you’re online? Are those hours spent on social networks really more important than spending time playing or reading with your child?

As a bonafide internet junky I’m as guilty as anyone else of letting my online “life” interfere with real life and what’s truly important.

For more information about the study and some other perspectives visit:

Center for the Digital Future – (only highlights of the report)
Christian Post
Internet Use Cuts Into Family Time

For details visit: Fathers’ Day Contest on momz.com.

I apologize for posting this very sad news. My hope is that we dads can all learn something from it and perhaps even find a way to show some support this heartbroken family as they struggle to live their lives after this tragedy.

If you have ever seen a car or truck doing donuts you’ll understand how debris gets kicked up and thrown about as the wheels and vehicle spin. Apparently at the Monster truck show in Tacoma Washington Friday night a piece of metal from a truck in the show the was launched into the stands after another truck began doing donuts. Sebastian, a 6 year-old, was struck in the head by a frisbee-sized piece of metal weighing approximately 10 lbs.

Little Sebastian never had a chance. They rushed him to the hospital, but he died yesterday morning from the blow to his head.

For more on the story: 6 Year-old killed in Monster truck mishap

Needless to say the family is devastated and angry. Sadly, the show continued on as the event organizers were completely oblivious to what had happened. Amazingly, the shows scheduled for Saturday and today are going on as planned despite the obvious dangers to people in the stands.

Please don’t assume any event is completely safe for you or your kids. Don’t depend on anyone else to be as concerned about the safety of your family as you are. When you’re with your family look at everything as though you are responsible for the safety of those involved. If the situation doesn’t pass your test then do the responsible thing(s): Try to correct the situation, tell someone in charge about your concerns, leave or don’t go in the first place.

Apparently the teenager suffered from seizures and with the cause of death being reported as a head injury suffered in a fall in their bathroom it appears the boy had a seizure and fell hitting his head on the bathtub.

His son also suffered from autism so there will be banter about that as being involved as some have claimed dad Travolta neglected to treat his Son’s condition due to his religious beliefs. Let’s hope these folks restrain themselves and let the Travolta family mourn their loss without too much drama.

Source: Yahoo – Article on Son’s death

Beyond avoiding the unpleasantness of an amniocentesis test, the more important difference is the fact that the pregnant mother avoids the risks associated with the test altogether. It gets better…, the Sequenom test is a “home-brewed test” allowing an expectant mother to perform the simple test at home and as early as the end of the first trimester.

These tests will be available in June 2009. For more information: Sequenom

In trials the test performs extremely well with no false positives and 99.1% detection rate of abnormalities. These numbers are astounding and the tests should become popular with doctors and patients and widely used for prenatal screening.

Michelle Raheja, a university professor and mother of a kindergartner at Condit Elementary School, wrote to her daughter’s teacher. “I’m sure you can appreciate the inappropriateness of asking children to dress up like slaves (and kind slave masters), or Jews (and friendly Nazis), or members of any other racial minority group who has struggled in our nation’s history.”

The absurd opinions expressed by Raheja, who like so many of us (myself include) has some indian blood in her DNA, have caused the timid school board to cave in to her demands to ban these costumes at the school.

Needless to say this nonsense has struck a chord with parents who are fed up with people pushing their political correctness agendas down the throats of others at the expense of children and long standing traditions in our country.

For more on the story: Thanksgiving Costumes at Claremont

Boys Autism May Have Saved the Both of Them

Christopher was laughing as the father and son were pulled farther and farther from Ponce Inlet, Florida. As the pair lunged for buoys — and missed — Christopher couldn’t help but giggle. It was this spirit that helped ground Marino, the father said.

“It was a big entertainment roller coaster for him, that’s what got me through it — because he wasn’t freaking out,” said Marino, 46. But after four hours at sea without a life vest, and after it became obvious that rescue operations had ceased for the night, jellyfish began to sting the pair. That began to “freak Christopher out,” his father said.

While Christopher is almost nonverbal in his communication, he and his father use catch phases from Disney movies, which the boy loves, to communicate. After four hours, the currents picked up, and Christopher began to drift from his father’s reach. Because of the darkness, they couldn’t see each other. So Marino shouted out part of a phrase to his son. “To infinity,” Marino shouted, referencing one of Christopher’s favorite lines from the movie “Toy Story.” “And beyond,” Christopher shouted back, pumping his fist in the air like movie character Buzz Lightyear.

The call and response went on for a while, with Marino choosing different phrases and Christopher yelling back. But over the course of an hour, Christopher’s voice faded until his father couldn’t hear him anymore.

“That’s when I resigned myself to the fact that he was gone,” Marino told CNN, saying he believed his son had been pulled under the water.

At the time, Marino said, he thought about giving up, until he thought of his daughter Angela. She had just registered for ballroom dance classes, and he told himself over and over he would live to see her dance. “I just kept thinking about her and how I was not going to leave her without a brother and her father in the same day — not on my watch,” he told CNN. “It was the visual of her that kept me going.”

Marino used other tricks to keep his mind focused in the 81-degree water. He remembered going to the Ponce Inlet museum, which highlighted a lighthouse. He then set out to use the lighthouse as a guide for himself, so he would know how far he was from shore. He alternated doing the “doggie paddle” and floating on his back with his ears in the water, the way his son loved to. He would float on his back and watch the bright stars. He wished on four shooting stars that flew by and used constellations in the sky to know what direction to go if he drifted away.

Under the stars and in the dark Atlantic, he turned to his spirituality, realizing his life was in God’s hands. A religious medal rested on his chest.

As morning turned, Marino tried to stay alert for sounds that might mean help was near. Hearing a boat motor, he waved frantically. Soon, a group of fishermen pulled him aboard their boat. A flash of light from the medallion had caught the eye of one of the anglers, who shouted at his brother at the helm to stop the boat, one of Marino’s rescuers told him.

The first thing Marino asked was if the men had heard anything about his son, but they hadn’t.
Marino began to grieve. It had been nearly eight hours since he had last seen his son, and he believed he was gone for good. He wept.

When the U.S. Coast Guard arrived, Marino asked them, too, about Christopher, but they said they had not found him. The Coast Guard crew asked if he wanted to go to the hospital, but he decided to stay on the boat so the search for Christopher wouldn’t be disrupted. But Marino chose not to watch the water as the search went on. “I chose to be down below, because I didn’t want to see them pull up on Christopher being face-down in the water,” he said. So the Coast Guard vessel steamed on. After more than an hour, the boat went full throttle, jolting Marino backward in his space below deck.

Suddenly, the boat was idling, and Marino was asked to come topside. “That was my personal green mile,” Marino told CNN, a reference to what some people call the walk on death row from the cell to the execution chamber. “I took three steps up the green mile to the back of the deck, and they pointed to the helicopter and they said, ‘You see that helicopter? It has your son on it, and he is fine,’ ” Marino recalled a crew member saying. Marino was so excited he began “kissing all the Coast Guard guys.”

The father and son were reunited at the emergency room at Halifax Medical Center in Daytona Beach, where they were treated for dehydration. “We were both very weak, tired and thirsty,” Marino said. “But I reached out and held his hand and could tell from the same sparkle in his eye that he was going to be fine.”

While Christopher can’t truly communicate what he felt during those hours alone at sea, his father hopes that one day, he will be able to tell him what he felt alone in the Atlantic. The one thing Marino knows is that his son still loves the water and that the experience hasn’t taken away that special comfort from him.

“It may be a while before we go back to a beach,” Marino said. “But he still loves the water. He’s already gotten back in a pool.”