Elena 
Starting with the political, TSO has a nice bit about the Scooter Libby mess. It’s never the crime, it’s the cover up! sigh… you’d think they’d learn.
One of my favorite posts from the Catholic Carnival this week was from The Catholic Spitfire Grill!
Thus a Calvinist is a Catholic obsessed with the Catholic idea of the sovereignty of God. Chesterton
The whole post was very thought provoking.
I liked Esther at Catholic Family Mom’s posting on Lent and Spring Cleaning too!
Alicia linked to this article on the state of birth in the modern world:
The woman, who is expecting her first child, is a week past her due date. Even though tests show that her baby is doing well, her obstetrician decides to induce labor with Cytotec. It’s a drug that has not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for pregnant women, and it can cause contractions that are strong enough to lacerate the anatomical barrier that keeps amniotic fluid separate from the mother’s blood vessels — a situation known as amniotic fluid embolism (AFE). AFE is almost always fatal.
The woman’s contractions speed up immediately, but the doctor continues to give her Cytotec until her contractions are coming so rapidly that the baby is having difficulty getting oxygen. The fetal monitor shows that the baby is in extreme distress, so the doctor sets to work to save it.
Shortly after the birth, the mother starts to hemorrhage and goes into shock. The baby dies 35 minutes after birth. The mother dies a few hours later from AFE.
This nightmarish scenario is one of many from Marsden Wagner’s book Born in the USA: How a Broken Maternity System Must Be Fixed to Put Women and Children First (University of California Press, 2006). A perinatologist and a scientist, Wagner is a former director of women’s and children’s health at the World Health Organization (WHO). He’s also an old-fashioned whistleblower. By his lights, the American birth industry is in a crisis because we have turned a natural event into a medical condition. As a result, we’ve allowed obstetricians — and not the midwives who safely deliver the majority of the world’s babies — to control maternity care. The ironic result is that in our efforts to make birth as safe as possible, we have saddled American women and babies with a system that, despite being the most expensive on earth, puts us in the bottom tier of care for wealthy countries.
Today, more than 15 years after Jessica Mitford detailed the potential hazards of obstetrical forceps, fetal monitoring, and diagnostic ultrasound in The American Way of Birth and more than a quarter century after Immaculate Deception, author Suzanne Arms’ expose of high-tech birth, sold more than 250,000 copies, the number of American women who die around the time of birth is on the rise. According to WHO, 28 countries — including Croatia, Ireland, Kuwait, and Portugal — have lower maternal mortality rates. Forty-one countries have lower infant mortality rates.
I don’t think it helps either that you have Britney Spears and other celebrity types signing up for C-sections to avoid the natural births because they think it’s safer and easier. Perhaps they didn’t know:
Even in an elective cesarean, a woman is almost three times more likely to die than in a vaginal birth. Beyond the immediate health risks, having a C-section decreases a woman’s chance to become pregnant again and doubles the risk of an unexplained stillbirth in later pregnancies. In 2 to 6 percent of cesareans, a doctor accidentally cuts into a baby. Babies born from an elective C-section are twice as likely as babies born vaginally to end up in neonatal intensive care.
CopyBlogger gives us some grammatical help. (I am guilty of these mistakes and constantly have to go back and fix my work! I need a proofreader!!)
The headmistress at the Common Room had some ideas about what parents can do when they are trying to keep up with their kids in the area of classical reading. I am struggling with that right now, but I am finding that I just have to sit down and read the book! If I give up superfluous t.v. watching or other time wasters I can usually manage but it takes a while. I really liked her idea about books on tape and I do that frequently in the summertime.
Feminine Genius had a story about a mom who is doing her best to take care of her children, and bravely attempts to go out with her kids, they act up and one of them upsets the grocery cart making a lot of noise and commotion. I certainly can relate to that!! Ten years ago I was the mother of 7, 3, and 1 year old little boys who were always getting into some sort of mischief!! It always blessed me so to have someone open a door, or have a kind word, and of course it also deflated me to hear about rotten my kids were (and boy do I have stories bout Calvin – my initiation to motherhood by fire!!) It’s good to remember that help goes a lot farther than a tsk! to a struggling young mom!
Trinity Prep School had a chicken cordon bleu casserole that I know Mr. Pete would love for his birthday! (coming on on March 22!)
Catholic Fire’s collection of quotes on humility are worth bookmarking!
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