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CHICAGO (Reuters) – Babies who use many gestures to communicate when they are 14 months-old have much larger vocabularies when they start school than those who don't, U.S. researchers said on Thursday. They said babies with wealthier, better-educated parents tend to gesture more and this may help explain why some children from low-income families fare less well in school. "When children enter school, there is a large socioeconomic gap in their vocabularies," said the University of Chicago's Meredith Rowe, whose study appears in the journal Science. Gestures could help explain the difference, Rowe told the American Association for the Advancement...

I have a friend with a 2 week old newborn who's starting to loose it. Hubby is in Iraq and the baby is waking up every two hours all night long. I know there are strategies to help babies, even as little as this one, to start sleeping for 4 or 6 hours at night, but I don't know what they are. (I failed miserably at this with my own kids and my daughter woke up every two hours until she was 15 months old.) I remember FReepers giving good advice on this issue a few years ago and hope...

Every baby could have its genetic code mapped out at birth within 10 years, a process which will predict conditions such as diabetes and heart disease and help prevent them. Jay Flatley, head of leading genome company Illumina, predicted a revolution in healthcare after the complete DNA read-out for every newborn becomes a technical reality. He said only social and legal issues would delay the process. But with many people reluctant to have their genome read for fear it could be used against them by employers or insurance companies, the process is expected to raise difficult questions over privacy. The...

A California woman shocked doctors by giving birth on Monday to octuplets, believed to be only the second set of eight babies born in the United States. The six boys and two girls were doing well and were in stable condition in the neonatal intensive care unit, said Dr. Karen Maples at the Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in the Los Angeles suburb of Bellflower.

WASHINGTON - Many people like to stop and play with newborn babies, but now some adult women are playing house with fake babies. Some women are even going as far as taking day trips with the fake babies to the park, out to eat, and even hosting birthday parties for them. Forty-nine-year-old Linda is married with no children of her own. Now, she says she feels like a mother because she has Reborns -- dolls made to look and feel like the real thing. "It's not a crazy habit, like, you know, drinking, or some sort of, something that's...

Yahoo has done Andrew Sullivan proud with their headlines.....and doesn't this have a "deja vue" ring to it? And, didn't we just see this same media trick in September? Of course the article has to go on to mention that the babies Father-Levi Johnston mothers was recently arrested on Drug Charges. Johnston's mother, Sherry, was arrested on drug charges earlier this month after an undercover narcotics investigation.

Natural Childbirth Moms More Attuned to Babies' Cry Finding may help shed light on postpartum depression in those choosing Caesareans THURSDAY, Sept. 11 (HealthDay News) -- Mothers who delivered their babies vaginally appear to be much more sensitive to the cry of their own child within a few weeks of the birth compared with those who deliver by Caesarean section, a new study shows. The finding, published in The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, give researchers insight into why postpartum depression seems to be linked more often to Caesarean birth. The researchers based their findings on MRI scans that...

Liberals breathlessly criticized Sarah Palin because she had the audacity to be interviewed at a turkey farm while turkeys were being terminated. How on earth do liberals think that turkeys die on the way to the table? Natural causes? Hey it could be worse, at least they weren’t the victim of a Bartial Birth Abortion. Compare the Palin video (below) to demonstration videos of Partial Birth Abortion (also below)

Eight months later, in August, the heavily pregnant Rebekah began to notice that the military base at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where her husband is based, and the neighbouring town of Fayetteville were overrun with new and expectant mothers. Nature had taken its course when the legendary 82nd Airborne Division began returning home from Iraq, along with special operations forces also based at Fort Bragg, and the result is a baby boom, which has left hospitals straining to cope not with combat casualties but bouncing newborn infants. Last weekend Rebekah Sandelin, 32, was one of 1,000 mothers from Fort Bragg...

Many were euphoric the night Barack Obama was elected US President. The day after, a few bloggers wrote about their greatest hope: that they would have an “Obama baby”. - Many claimed that they could have conceived a child on November 4 after a night of celebration. With exit polls showing that Obama had won over 66 per cent of people aged 18-29, the young were particularly ecstatic. As a result, there could be a boom in births on or around August 4, 2009 – which is the President’s 48th birthday. Indeed, it is possible that Obama himself was conceived...

<p>DALLAS — Darlie Routier, the suburban homemaker on death row following the fatal stabbings of her two young sons, will be allowed to have new forensic tests on evidence in the 12-year-old case.</p> <p>A federal judge in San Antonio granted testing a bloody sock with human hair that was found near the crime scene. The judge also gave permission to run four fingerprints through a national database and new analysis of a butcher knife presented at trial as the murder weapon and fibers from another knife. The decision signed Nov. 5 comes months after the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals allowed for testing of some pubic and facial hairs.</p>

Decontee Williams was so excited by Barack Obama's victory on Tuesday night that she started jumping up and down — and went into labor. Twelve hours later, Barack Jeilah was born at Phoenix Baptist Hospital to Williams and Prince Jeilah. The baby was 8 pounds 9 ounces and had a full head of hair. "I love Barack Obama, and I love the name," said Williams, 31, who came to the United States as a refugee from Liberia in 2003. "In Africa, we call it a blessing. That is a good name." In the last week, Barack, Obama, Michelle, Malia and...

Recently, my wife and I took our 8-month-old daughter on a trip involving five plane flights in one week. Many people would be reluctant to travel with a baby that small, but we had a compelling reason: We have Fig Newtons for brains. An intelligent person, or even a reasonably bright fungus, would know that two people cannot possibly carry both a baby and all the supplies the baby needs, including stroller, car seat, clothes, diapers, industrial-sized bale of wipes, stuffed bear, stuffed tiger, stuffed frog, stuffed paramecium, etc. The total weight of all these supplies can be hundreds of...

The government is warning parents about Carter's Inc. baby garments with tag-less labels after about 400 babies who wore the clothing developed rashes on their backs. The warning applies to the fall 2007 line, which includes about 110 million garments, said Mary Drayna, a manager for the Atlanta company. The Consumer Product Safety Commission said Friday that children should stop using these garments if they develop a rash, but the agency did not announce a recall of the product line. Drayna said the affected clothing includes knit items such as body suits, shirts and pajamas. She said the items have...

In a historic change with political and cultural implications for the nation's largest minority group, a baby boom has helped Hispanics account for just over half of the overall population growth in the United States since 2000, according to a report released Thursday. Different from the past, the nation's Latino population growth in this decade has been more a product of birthrate than immigration, according to the report from the Pew Hispanic Center. Since 2000, the nation's Latino population has increased by 10.2 million - 6 million from births in the United States and 4.2 million from immigration. "What we...

My husband and I just found out we're going to be bringing 2 future Freepers into the world this spring!!! WHHHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

An eight-year-old dog has touched the hearts of Argentines by saving the life of an abandoned baby, placing him safely alongside her own new puppies. The country's media are calling him "the miracle baby". He was born prematurely to a 14-year-old girl in a shanty town outside the capital, Buenos Aires. She is said to have panicked and abandoned the boy in a field, surrounded by wooden boxes and rubbish. Then along came La China, the dog which somehow picked up the baby and carried him 50m to place him alongside her own puppies. The dog's owner heard the child...

New Focus on Children at AIDS Seminar By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN Published: August 6, 2008 MEXICO CITY — The global response to the AIDS epidemic has short-changed children, health workers at the International AIDS Conference said here on Wednesday. Although governments and donors provide large amounts of money for H.I.V. treatment in the developing world, too little of that money reaches children, said Linda Richter, a psychologist in South Africa who delivered the first plenary lecture on children in the history of the conference. She also said that despite increased efforts to reach pregnant women, too few of them were...

London: A British mom has managed to retain her size zero figure – despite giving birth to 13 kids, with the 14th on its way. The 37-year-old Joanne Watson, in her first trimester, loves being pregnant and always manages to get back her 7st 5lbs ideal weight after giving birth. "I''m lucky because I always sail through my pregnancies and have no symptoms whatsoever at the moment," Mirror quoted her as saying. Joanne, who is 5ft 2ins, said: "Some people say I'm mad. But we're as thrilled that we're expecting for the 14th time as we were the first time....

"Cities across America are applying to participate in the fall 2008 nationally coordinated 40 Days for Life campaign – a focused initiative that promises to be the largest and longest coordinated pro-life mobilization in history," said David Bereit, national campaign director of 40 Days for Life. "Abortion claims more than 1.2 million innocent lives in the United States each year," he added, "and in 2008, the stakes for our nation are higher than ever. People of faith and conscience are approaching this challenge with a heightened sense of urgency." 40 Days for Life is a community-based campaign that features 40...