Sarah Laskow says

There's another clear career choice that Weiner could make right now, though: with a baby on the way, he could choose to be a stay-at-home dad, at least for those first few, very demanding years of child care. His wife certainly has enough on her plate. He's spared us so far the "I'd like to spend more time with my family" line, but in his case, it's actually a good option.

Source: TAPPED

I'm not sure if Laskow was serious but I think it really is a good option. Obviously since I was able to choose to be a stay at home dad. And unlike our situation Weiner's partner is very well paid and, considering her income, almost certainly has excellent benefits as well.

Unlike someone with a conventional career the "life cycle" of a stay at home parent would be pretty conducive to Weiner's eventual reentry to his life-long career of politics as well.

The first few years are pretty at-home intensive, which is fine because caring for very young children seems like it ought to be fatally boring. But while it turns out that it is kind of boring it also turns out that small children are endlessly engaging. And kind of stunningly creative. And when the see you as the primary caregiver they care back! A lot! That plus you get a whole 'nother perspective on society, in large part because for all the "mommy blogging" you hear about the very real world of domestic sociability is almost shockingly invisible to popular culture. And the networks you build through preschool and playgroups and playgrounds and birthday parties with other parents with children your age are wonderfully supportive of each other.

But then, when your (last) child enters kindergarten, you start out with about 2-4 hours a day where you can start volunteering outside the home. Usually not to far from them, and usually you have to be a little interruptible since small children melt down, get sick, or need in-class support. But again, an amazing amount of society, both social and civil, is held together by stay at home parents putting in those initially limited hours. And as time goes on, and your children go deeper and deeper into elementary school and as they become more and more self-reliant, the stay at home parent begins to be more of a "stay at home" parent -- meaning you're actually often out and about quite a bit. And there's a magic moment somewhere around 5th or 6th grade where your children still need you, very much, but they don't need you for very much. And so as long as you can sort of be there for them, to listen in, to tuck them into bed and get them off to school, and to be relatively near for after school activities. But at some point you and the other stay at home parents start having much more time free because children like to go to each other's houses. And that means a) your children are over at other people's houses or b) they're all over at yours but except for the occasional interruption they'll entertain each other very well without much intervention.

If I was going into politics, the way, say, Senator Patty Murray did, I think the bottom-up migration path that comes from stay at home parenting would be an excellent place to start from.

And if Weiner was good on social, domestic, and gender's issues before (and sexting notwithstanding he was, well, outstanding) he's be the total bomb when his children were ready for him to run for serious office again.

So, yeah, again I'm not sure if Laskow was serious. But I'm serious. I think he's enjoy it immensely. As I have!

Jessica of The Imperfect Parent says of the interminable breast/bottle battle

People, get a grip. The bullying that takes place, especially cyberbullying, over how a mother chooses to feed her baby, is nothing short of bullshit. There is nothing wrong with a mother choosing to formula feed.

On the flip side, nobody should give a flying squirrels butt if a mother loves to breastfeed but it's not something that other mothers should be forced to admire either.

Source: The Imperfect Parent

For the record my siblings and I were nursed right through the very pinnacle of formula feeding and the uttermost ebb of breast feeding.  My grandfather and early La Leche League proponent became an activist in direct response to the health differences he noticed between "scientific diet" fed city infants and breast fed infants of poor, often illiterate "hillbillies" in his mixed urban/rural western North Carolina practice.

But even he didn't panic over the differences.  He wrote a book strongly advocating breast feeding, but he also published a number of papers on normal, healthy children's awesomely omnivorous resilience to the extraordinary number of things people through out the ages, throughout different cultures, and even throughout different neighborhoods give them.

The key word there being healthy children.  Until relatively recently the debate over what was then known as "scientific diet," a debate that largely fueled the turn away from breast milk to formula* was fueled by physicians... who, he observed, dealt primarily with unhealthy infants.  Unhealthy infants require special treatment and special diets because they're unhealthy, not because they're infants.  My grandfather said this was an amazingly difficult concept to communicate.

If he were alive today (he'd be in his 130s) he'd almost certainly opine that it's the very resilience of normal children that's kept the bottle/breast controversy rage for nearly a century.

My main point, though, is that because domestic child nutrition has traditionally been the domain of women, and because the debate is literally unwinnable (at least at a granularity of centuries) the controversy provides an enormous, and enormously popular opportunity for further variations of slut-shaming and policing.

* the word formula itself hints at its origins in the "scientific diet" movement. --fl

Via Bridget Crawford here's a highly unlikely but also deeply gender-bound hitch in paternity law

Nathaniel was a California teenager who became a father in 1995. The mother of Nathaniel’s child was named Ricci, and at the time of conception, she was thirty-four years old. Nathaniel, however, was merely fifteen. Although Nathaniel admitted to having sex with Ricci voluntarily about five times, the fact that he was under sixteen years of age at the time made it legally impossible for him to consent to sexual intercourse. In other words, under California law, Nathaniel was not only a new father, but was also a victim of statutory rape. Nonetheless, in a subsequent action for child support, the court held that Nathaniel was liable for the support of the child who was born as a result of his rape. According to the court, “Victims have rights. Here, the victim also has responsibilities.”

Source: Feminist Law Professors

This is particularly vexing because unlike the standard "pro-life" solution for pregnancy and statutory rape when the victim is a woman, the unwilling, underage father is pretty much positively unable to "relinquish" his child for adoption unless the child's adult mother is willing.  Thus he can be held liable in a way that underage maternity victims are not: he's held to "responsibilties" an underage, or even of age female counterpart wouldn't be.  Without getting all rabidly MRA about the femininister hegemony being responsible (it isn't since nearly all paternity laws vastly, vastly predate feminism) one can still notice that it's... pretty unequal treatment under the law.

So.  Short term such laws really ought to be changed.

Next, I'm still annoyed at the part where the woman who seduced the child isn't being held liable for the transgression.  Let alone being allowed to keep the infant herself rather than, say, surrendering it to the victim's family.  Even if they chose to "relinquish" the infant for adoption he or she would still end up in a better home than the mother would likely offer.  (There's certainly precedent for this -- Mary Kay Laterno's victim's family raised the baby she had as a result of repeatedly statutorily raping her 13-year-old victim.)

The rest of the paper Prof. Crawford passes along might be a little more problematic.  Having identified one area where an involuntary father can be held liable for an offspring he was unable to consent to the author, Michael J. Higdon of, I think, the University of Tennessee, proposes extending the standard release of parental liability given to voluntary sperm donors for IVF to non-consenting, involuntary sperm donors.  That's problematic, I think, because without a really clear definition of "involuntary" you're going to open the door to a lot of guys who are perfectly happy to consent to sex but don't want to bother with the semi-inevitability of paternity.

But one way or the other the Nathaniel/Ricci case suggests that (pre-feminist) gender presumptions about men's and women's agency and responsibility in the domain of pregnancy really do need to be adjusted.

Great quote from solo artist and Dresden Dolls co-founder Amanda Palmer in Spin magazine

"I've been really shocked and distressed to find out that 8- and 9-year-old girls are getting all their pubic hairs waxed off by their mothers," she says. "I think if I have any purpose at all, it's to stand up there and say, 'Oh, no, no, no, no, girls. You totally have a choice. You can wax it, you can shave it, you can grow it out, and this really is up to you.' That's the way that I feel about everything, that you just need to know there's a choice out there."

Adds Pope, the director: "On the surface, it's a song about girls growing out their pubes. Underneath that, however, is a call to everyone, woman and man alike, to discover the courage to be themselves. Whoever that may be."

Source: Spin

That sounds exactly right. I couldn't find the right post this morning but I remember Holly of The Pervocracy saying that for her the decision to remove her pubic hair signaled adulthood rather than pre-pubescence. There are obviously plenty of good cases for never fiddling with your body hair at all in adulthood but this isn't about that. Beyond basic sanitation whatever one's choice might be, as a child or an adult, it ought to be your choice and not your parents. And yeah, having your mom decide to wax you isn't as permanent as other decisions parents make: piercing ears, circumcision, or sex reassignment surgery come to mind, so if it's just getting waxed you can stop once you're out of the house.  (Right, as if only permanent physical alterations leave mental scars.)  So let's just add this to the list of things you should leave it to the child to decide. When he or she grows up.

(Note: based on conversation with teachers and other parents this is one of those areas where a) daughters are more subject to parental pressure and b) moms tend to bring more of that pressure to bear.)

Another note on the pubic hair, just to tease my friend Chingona, who's promised never to go easy on me about pubic hair pontificating: the real question to ask these days isn't so much why women are or aren't grooming their pubic hair. Instead it should be why men aren't doing it more -- after all the same esthetic, hygenic, and sensory arguments ought to apply both ways. Actually, technically, to the extent they apply at all they do apply both ways.

(Link to Palmer quote via SexIsNotTheEnemy)

Update: Palmer's assertion that mothers are waxing their 8-year-olds may be related to this article in The Frisky which reports spa owners in the Bay Area and NYC are trying to build a market for it.  So with any luck it could be another one of those all sizzle, no steak stories like rainbow bracelets, vagazzling, or labiaplasty.  (I gotta say, though, the telling line would be a spa owner in NYC who said "in 10 years, waxing children will be like taking them to the dentist or putting braces on their teeth."  Um, yeah.  Waxing? Braces tightening? What child could possibly object?