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A Story Before Bed is a website that allows parents with webcams to upload videos of themselves reading bedtime stories to their children, which the children can access when desired. High-resolution images of the books' pages flip across the screen to create the impression of a real mutual reading experience.

The library of available books has continued to grow, and now the site has begun featuring authors of children's books reading their own stories. This series begins wtih Oliver Chin's Baltazar and the Flying Pirates, but promises to include more.

Link | A Story Before Bed

A fifteen-year old boy in Italy needed a new heart, but was ineligible for a human heart transplant. So doctors put in a new type of artificial heart that they expect will keep him alive for 20-25 years:

Dr Amodeo said the artificial heart was around 4cm long and had been placed inside the left ventricle and its connection with the ascending aorta.

He said: "The device is an electrically activated hydraulic pump and is entirely located inside the thorax, in order to reduce the risk of infection.

"It is powered through a plug positioned behind the left ear and connected to the battery that the patient holds on a belt and is charged during the night like a mobile phone.

Link via Gizmodo | Photo by Flickr user Peter Burgin used under Creative Commons license

In a column at Salon, Madeline Holler shares her story about giving birth at home. She initially decided to do so in front of her young children, ages 3 and 7, so that the childbirth was a whole-family experience:

I shut out the noise, pushed through the pain and squeezed my son out the rest of the way. I reached for him while still on my knees and then turned to rest my back against the side of the tub.

Happy, relieved and a little overwhelmed, I threw my head back against the side of the pool to look at Wayne. My cheek brushed against Beatrice as she reached over to touch her brother's back. I pushed my head into her side, an armless hug, a reassuring nudge. I felt her solid body and her softness next to me.

"Can I hold him?" she asked.

After the cord was cut each sister took turns with their brother. In the meantime, we chatted, I answered the midwife's questions, remembered to actually nurse the little guy.

Link via Momlogic | Photo (unrelated) via Flickr user 3Neus used under Creative Commons license

Melissa Peacock, 17, has crippling headaches because of a rare medical condition in which her body produces too much spinal fluid. To relieve pressure on her brain, doctors hooked up a tube up to drain the excess fluid directly into her stomach:

Doctors punctured her skull to drain the fluid nine times but, when the fluid returned, they decided on a more drastic operation.

‘I’ve got a lot of scars on my head from various operations – but I try to make sure my hairstyle always covers them up,’ said Melissa.

Surgeons twice tried to attach a tube from her lower spine to her stomach but both times the tubes shifted.

They then decided to insert a permanent tube directly into her brain.

Link via GearFuse | Photo: Caters

A Spanish law declared that women were entitled to schedule a half hour off of work per day for the first nine months after childbirth in order to facilitate breastfeeding. When a man challenged the law as discriminatory, a European court declared that fathers are entitled to the same right:

The Spanish man who challenged the law, Pedro Manuel Roca Alvarez, said his request to take breastfeeding leave from his job in Galicia was rejected because the mother of his child was self-employed.

The top court said such a refusal could have the effect of forcing self-employed mothers to limit their work because the father cannot share the burden.

Link | Photo (unrelated) via Flickr user Lars Ploughmann used under Creative Commons license

Lexi Lacey was born premature with a birthweight of 14 ounces. Doctors gave her just a ten percent chance of survival. But she improved -- in part because of a sandwich bag that doctors are using as an insulating jacket:

Her mother Chelsea Rowberry, 17, said: ''The doctors told us they had never known a baby born as prematurely as Lexi survive.

''She was so tiny the only thing they had to keep her body temperature warm was a sandwich bag from the hospital canteen - it's incredible to think that saved her life.

Lexi is now back at home with her parents.

Link | Photo: SWNS

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Your adorable kid video for today is this young lady rockin' out while eating chili. She's the daughter of semi-famous DJ Omar Santana and she's listening to one of her daddy's tracks.

via Urlesque

A boy had sex with the 14-year old daughter of a San Jose, California police officer. So the police officer drove to the boy's home, handcuffed him, and lectured him for several minutes:

The officer said: "It does not bode well for you. Do you know what that means? No? Not a good thing that the person you had sex with is a cop's daughter. The district attorney will probably file charges.

"A cop's daughter is not somebody you mess around with. You're stupid."

One of the boy's parents videoed the incident and complained to police.

Link | Photo (unrelated) by Flickr user Elvert Barnes used under Creative Commons license

Jim of Jim's Pancakes makes creatively shaped and arranged pancakes in order to entertain his young daughter, Allison. Recently, after touring a natural history museum, he made this 3D arrangement of pancakes in the shape of a dinosaur.

Link via Great White Snark

Previously:
Jim's Pancakes
Tetris Pancakes

Abbott, the manufacturer of Similac baby formula, is holding a huge recall of its products due to contamination by beetle larvae. At the link, you can search to see if your baby's formula is effected. The site is currently experiencing very heavy traffic, so you can also download a .pdf list of all recalled items if you are unable to search.

Recall List and News Article -- Thanks, Wifey! | Photo via Flickr user The Consumerist used under Creative Commons license

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Singer Katy Perry appeared on a Sesame Street YouTube video. She sang a version of her song "Hot 'N' Cold" with Elmo. The video has since been pulled down after numerous complaints by parents that Perry was baring too much skin for children's programming.

Link via Geekosystem

At Foreign Policy's blog Passport, Joshua Keating notes an academic paper that found that the dictatorial a leader is, in general, the more children he has. From the paper:

We provide a theory whereby non-benevolent, non-democratic leaders increase their expected family size to raise the likelihood that a child will be a match at continuing the regime’s survival. As a consequence, having a larger family size raises the non-democratic leader’s expected rents that they can exploit from the citizenry. In contrast, democratic leaders have a lower desire to appropriate rents from the citizenry, and therefore have a diminished desire to have additional children for these purposes. We construct a data set of the number of children of country leaders as of August 31, 2005. We find that in a sample of 221 country leaders, fully non-democratic leaders have approximately 1.5–2.5 more actual children as compared to if they are fully democratic.

Link via io9 | Photo: AP

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Those of you who haven't lived in Alabama may struggle to grasp the magnitude of the rivalry between the respective football fans of the University of Alabama and Auburn University. Suffice it to say that Alabamians take their football very seriously.

That's why the ultimate threat against a 4-year old Crimson Tide fan is to take him to the Auburn Store.

via reddit

A study in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology suggests that very young children can understand ironic language. From the abstract:

Children's responses to others' ironic utterances were coded for their understanding of meaning and conversational function. Mothers were especially likely to ask rhetorical questions and to use ironic language in conflictual contexts. In contrast, fathers used hyperbole and understatement as frequently as rhetorical questions, and employed ironic language in both positive and conflictual contexts. Children also showed evidence of a nascent ability to use ironic language, especially hyperbole and rhetorical questions. Family members used rhetorical questions and understatement proportionately more often in a negative interaction context.

Link | Journal Article (payment required) | Photo by Flickr user adpk used under Creative Commons license

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Humorist Ryan Iverson puts on his best fake German accent and, speaking as filmmaker Werner Herzog, offers dark interpretations of children's books. He's already tackled Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, Madeline, and -- best of all -- Curious George. Most recently, Iverson has read about the haunted, hunted central character in the Where's Waldo? series.

via MomLogic