The blogosphere is abuzz with Olympic champion Marion Jones's request for a presidential pardon. Jones, who won three gold and two bronze medals at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, is serving an eight month sentence in Ft. Worth for lying to federal investigators about using performance-enhancing drugs and a check-fraud scheme.

From Fox Sports:

After frequently denying that she ever used performance-enhancing drugs, Jones admitted last October she had lied to federal investigators in November 2003. Jones also admitted lying about her knowledge of the involvement of Tim Montgomery, the father of her older son and a former 100-meter world-record holder, in a scheme to cash millions of dollars worth of stolen or forged checks.

Jones was sentenced in January to six months in prison and 400 hours of community service in each of the two years following her release. She was sentenced to six months on the steroids case and two months on the check-fraud case, but was permitted to serve those sentences concurrently.

The judge in Jones' case said the check-fraud scheme was a major crime, and the wide use of steroids "affects the integrity of athletic competition."

She has been in jail since March. As many in the Fox thread pointed out, she may have already served her term by the time the Justice Department gets to her application.

But I cringed to learn that Jones has two sons, a four-year-old and six-month-old. Not surprisingly, she is desperate to see them and the Celebrity Baby blog had a lengthy conversation about what she told her four-year-old and what it must have been like for the baby not see his mother. My heart breaks for her family.

Then again, this is no different than the many convicted mothers who are kept from their children and do not have Jones's name to remain in the press. Why oh why would a woman of Jones's talents be involved in a check-fraud scheme? I. don't. get. it.

What do you think? Should Jones receive a pardon or have her sentence commuted?

I could relate to the fears and uncertainty felt by the parents in this MSNBC article.

Mothers-to-be are receiving up to dozens of pamphlets urging them to bank their baby's cord blood. The cord blood contains stem cells, which are uniquely suited to the child and can help treat cancer and other childhood diseases.

But as MSNBC health writer JoNel Aleccia pointed out, the pamphleteers are private companies not upfront about the costs and low chances that a family will actually use the cord blood. Also, many hospitals are not equipped to handle donations for the public -- another option for families.

The vast majority of those parents — about 97 percent — will do nothing, and the umbilical cord and the cells it contains will be discarded as medical waste.

The tiny fraction that remain, however, will be caught in the sharp debate between private cord blood firms vying to cash in on an estimated $1 billion industry and public registries trying to boost diverse donations to fuel research and save lives in the community at large....

Overall, the chance that a publicly stored unit of cord blood will ever be used is about 650 times higher than the odds that a privately banked unit will ever be needed, (Dr. Dennis) Confer added....

The American Academy of Pediatrics last year urged parents to privately bank their babies’ blood only if they had an older child with cancer or a genetic disease that could benefit from a sibling’s donation. Otherwise, parents should donate to public banks, the panel said.

Because no one in our families had had the diseases listed on the cord blood registry, we opted against privately banking Eli's cord blood. We offered to donate it, but the hospital I delivered at was not equipped to take it. My midwife, however, assured me it was in the making, which is such a good idea IMHO.

I came across a thought-provoking and alarming diary on Daily Kos this morning, Infant mortality, race, and myths, comparing CDC statistics for American infant mortality between white and black babies, controlled for the education status of the mother:

                Infant mortality rates (deaths per 1000 live births)
Maternal years of education          White       Black
    0-8                                         6.3           13.4
    9-11                                        8.0           14.6
     12                                         6.1           13.2
   13-15                                        4.8           11.7
     16+                                        3.8           10.6

Certainly I realized that poorer babies were at greater risk for death, and the reasons seem mostly obvious: less access to health care, poorer nutrition, more pollution, more stress, fewer resources. But to see such a high infant death rate even for highly educated black women is heartbreaking.

I couldn't locate the study, but I remember, in the dusty corners of my mind, someone correlating infant mortality statistics to the previous generation - ie, that you could correlate infant health factors with socioeconomic status of their grandparents when the parents were born. Perhaps this is what is happening here. I don't know, but I hope someone is working on some solutions.

Uncle Bobby's Wedding, the children's book about a young guinea pig named Chloe and her uncle who marries his boyfriend, has received its first challenge.

A patron at Douglas County Libraries in Colorado asked that the book either be removed from the shelves, placed in a special area, or labeled “some material may be inappropriate for young children.”

Author Sarah Brannen alerted me to this via e-mail, saying "This is the first concrete evidence I have of the book being challenged." She also pointed me to the blog of James LaRue, the Libraries' director. His thoughtful and well-reasoned response to the patron is worth reading in full. It ends:

Finally, then, I conclude that “Uncle Bobby's Wedding” is a children's book, appropriately categorized and shelved in our children's picture book area. I fully appreciate that you, and some of your friends, strongly disagree with its viewpoint. But if the library is doing its job, there are lots of books in our collection that people won't agree with; there are certainly many that I object to. Library collections don't imply endorsement; they imply access to the many different ideas of our culture, which is precisely our purpose in public life.

Bravo.

This is likely the first of many challenges to the book. The ultra-right already had its eye on it, as evidenced by Brent Bozell III's shameless plagiarism of my review of the work. At least other librarians will have LaRue's letter as a starting point. Might be a good idea for all of us to print it out and keep ready to bring over to our local libraries, should the need arise.

(Crossposted at Mombian.)

Children are coming out at a younger age that gay straight alliance clubs are popping up in even middle schools, according to a story in the Washington Post.

But as the Post also pointed out, laws and protections against harassment of gays and lesbians have yet to catch up.

In recent years, 110 Gay Straight Alliance clubs, which are common in high schools nationwide, have sprouted in middle schools, including nine in Maryland and Virginia. Kevin Jennings, the founder of the first club, said he "never anticipated" they would also form in middle grades. His organization, the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, is creating age-appropriate pamphlets to respond to the trend.

This year, students in 1,046 middle schools took part in the Day of Silence, a protest against LGBT intolerance, organizers said, double the participation level of the previous year....

While children are coming out younger, studies show that they are doing so in schools where staff members have received little training in the area, where their fellow students use such language as "That's so gay" every day to express dislike, and where anti-bullying policies often don't exist or don't specifically protect students on the basis of sexual orientation.

In May, Maryland became the 11th state to enact a law to protect schoolchildren from being bullied because of sexual orientation. The District has had such a law since 1973; Virginia does not have one.

But California's anti-bullying policy, which is among only a handful to cite gender identity in addition to sexual orientation, could not stop what happened in February to the openly gay eighth-grader in a computer class in Oxnard.

Lawrence "Larry" King was in that class when he was fatally shot twice in the head....Larry didn't dress like other boys. He wore purple eye shadow and high-heeled boots. The 14-year-old classmate he had considered a possible valentine is charged with his death.

On the one hand, openly gay students are not suffering the alienation their closeted forebears did. But on the other hand, their parents, including at least one mother quoted in the Post story, worry that their children will become the target of ridicule and bullying.

Have any of your children come out? What were or are their experiences in school?

Courtney over at Feministing had a hilarious post about debutante balls. Apparently, a high school friend had a letter she wrote to the Colorado Springs debutante committee, rejecting their invitation. Here is what a high school-aged Courtney wrote:

I write in order to decline your invitation to be a 1998 debutante...I believe that the Debutante fanfare is a glazed over form of outdated discrimination...The simple fact that there are still organizations, like yours and the Jolly Jills, who spearate black and white young women as they brink on the edge of their adult lives, is a sad, sad message...To uphold tradition and validate family and giving are wonderful values to introduce into society. But, if in the process, you also introduce notions of socio-economic discrimination and racial segregation. What an unnecessary shame.

This post got me thinking if I have attended any such balls. Actually, no. Thankfully, where I lived in New Hampshire not even the prom was that big of a deal. I had never even heard of a debutante ball until I went to college and met someone who had one.

My friends in Florida had quinceañeras, which unfortunately cost the price of an American wedding, which is probably why I didn't have one. That, and the thought of showing up at my 15th birthday party in a billowy white dress and eating what looks like a wedding cake, would have been too embarrassing for me in my New Hampshire town.

I may throw a small one for my daughter in El Salvador or California, depending if she wants it. She will attend a school with many Latinos so I am assuming she will ask for her own quinceañera -- unless she is like Courtney and rebels. LOL!

But what about you all? Have you had a debutante ball, Sweet 16 party, Bat Mitzvah or quinceañera? What was your experience?

What's up with our fellow beings in the blogosphere?

Fellow MTer Christina included a lot of great shots from Austin and musings from the Netroots Nation Convention in her blog Trees and flowers and birds.

Michelle Obama is posting at BlogHer. Here is a recap of all the live blogging from the BlogHer conference this past weekend. Did any of you go? How was it?

Thankfully, our Hillary got wind of this New York Times story in her blog Actually: Shoddy electrical work on military bases by private companies has caused more deaths and injuries than previously admitted by the Pentagon.

In related news, San Francisco will have a ballot initiative this fall to name one of its sewage plants after President George W. Bush, according to the blog Arredonald.

The Anti-Racist Parent had the most comprehensive recommended book list -- "African American Studies 101" -- for white parents adopting black children.

This picture of Crazed Parent's dog with her lovey was adorable. You must see!

I am sorry I missed this episode of Wife Swap: Jeremy Adam Smith of Daddy Dialectic wrote about a wife swap between a family that had a high-powered career woman and a born-again Christian who home-schooled her six children. Sadly, the families ended up disgusted with one another rather than respecting their differences. What do you think? Did you see the show?

Here is a story for those of you with children undergoing the college admissions process: College applications are expected to peak next year so an increasing number of students are experiencing depression and other health problems related to stress, according to the Washington Post.

Oftentimes, the stress of the children are compounded by the expectations of their competitive parents, the Post reported.

Despite warnings by experts, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, which in 2006 issued a report about the perils of "pressure-filled intense preparation for a high-achieving adulthood," and a recent spate of popular books including "The Overachievers" (which focused on Bethesda, Maryland's Walt Whitman High School), there are few indications that high school students will face an altered landscape anytime soon.

Adolescent medicine specialists say that a primary cause of the apparent pervasiveness of this relentless activity is demographic: The number of applications to the nation's colleges is expected to peak with the class of 2009 and won't begin to decline for several more years. Although there is no precise definition of over-scheduling and little empirical research documenting its impact, pediatricians, psychologists and child psychiatrists say the problem is real.

They contend that some BlackBerry-tethered parents, who equate being constantly busy with being successful in their own lives, compete to see whose kids can cram in the most activities: pre-dawn swim practice, weekend travel soccer tournaments, elite ballet classes, Mandarin lessons, SAT tutoring sessions. Unstructured time, which experts say is essential to figuring out who one is and what one wants, tends to be regarded as laziness or being unproductive.

"Our definition of what makes a kid successful has become unbearably narrow," said California psychologist Madeline Levine, author of "The Price of Privilege," a 2006 book that documented the psychological fallout of unrealistic expectations and packed schedules on affluent teenagers.

The toxic combination of perfectionism and over-scheduling can lead to excesses such as those seen by University of Pennsylvania adolescent medicine specialist Kenneth Ginsburg, author of the AAP recommendations. Ginsburg said his patients have included a teenager who had started studying for the SATs at age 11 and high school students whose parents told them they "didn't need to bother to go to college" if they didn't get into either Harvard or Yale, schools that last year reported record-low acceptance rates hovering around 8 percent.

Wow, is this world just foreign to me. This is so much more intense than anything I saw at my high school -- and I went to a pretty good school. How are you moms with college-bound kids dealing with the pressure? Have your children heard back from colleges?

There's a whirlwind of activity here - so much to do, so many people to talk to. Just keeping all the options in mind is mentally taxing. I hardly know what day it is... and yet already things are starting to wrap up. It's after lunch on Saturday, after all.

The first panel I attended was the energy panel, and it was terrific. All the panelists were energizing (sorry) and on topic and were giving me new ideas, new themes that I will incorporate in my thinking about energy. One of the panelists showed us a photograph of a parking structure in Amsterdam - a parking structure of bicycles. I knew about biking in Amsterdam, but that picture (more dramatic than the one I linked to, alas) somehow twisted me on my axis. A parking structure. For bikes.

I attended the food panel and the energy panel on Friday, and they were excellent. In particular, I was left with this paraphrased (and likely mangled) quote from Michelle Simon, author of "Appetite For Profit", about corporate influence in food:

"Why is it that if children eat poorly at school, regulation is inappropriate because parents should exercise more responsibility, but we don't feel that way about child pornography?"

Discuss amongst yourselves.

As promised, here is a collage of our MotherTalkers adventure at Netroots Nation. This is the first NN that offered childcare sponsored by us and I am happy to report it has been a huge success so far. I've heard nothing but positive feedback.

From left to right: MT lurker Rachel, Ari, Lisa in Austin's children and their friend, Shenanigans and her DD, Erin's DD who knocked down two baskets of food and tired Eli in her stroller.

We have safely arrived at Netroots Nation. Thank you so much, Elisa, for setting up the childcare. DD is happily ensconced with the other kids and has already declared to me that this is the best vacation ever and that she loves Texas.

Two days ago, we took a brief walk south to Lady Bird Lake. It was hot and humid and everyone was tired, so perhaps we shouldn't have, but I was entranced by the turtles and birds we were able to see from the little footbridge and was not sorry even though I had to carry all 60 pounds of Dear Daughter back up the hill myself in the heat and humidity. Pictures over the flip.