After much waiting — and many false starts — WG is now a proud papa of an absolutely beautiful baby boy, the Little Pirate.

Congratulations to one of my original — and favorite — Venomites and his lovely bride!

Over the weekend, the Big-Eyed Boy and a new neighborhood friend used my son’s basketball not once but twice — twice! — as a dodge ball, both times targeting a much younger neighbor child who dealt with the resulting bloody noses like a real Trooper.

Naturally, I impounded the thing and have since informed my boy that, regardless of how classy the parents of the brutalized boy handled the situation, I was not pleased. He spent the rest of the evening in his room, miserably, and was taken the following day to inquire about the neighbor boy’s well-being so he could issue yet another apology. Frankly, I still don’t think the penalty was strong enough but I’m not sure what else I could legally do to teach him how to be more empathetic.

Then today my son began throwing a handball around in my formal living room, knocking over both one of my favorite family pictures as well as destroying a lamp. I took that one away, too, and in addition to sending the boy to “time out” on the steps for 30 minutes I put the ball into “toy time out” which lasts for a week.

Until recently, the Big-Eyed Boy had been a remarkably well-behaved child for the most part, which basically means that VH and I are just now having to train ourselves to exhibit the Parental Poker Face and remain stern when it’s time to mete out discipline. But, boy, is it hard. Today, well, the kid did put one right over the plate:

Boy: “So, when do I get my balls back?”

Me: “That’s really a question you’ll have to ask the woman you eventually marry, son.”

Yeah, I imagine we should probably add that to the list of things he’ll want to address with his therapist some day.

It’s been a rough day here in the Venomous Household. Delightful as it was having VH home for five straight days, the house is now a pigsty.

Meanwhile, the Big-Eyed Boy came down with both poison ivy and Swimmer’s Ear over the weekend, both of which necessitated middle-of-the-night medications and comforting. Although he’s mostly recovered, I have not: at 40 years old (41 in 2 weeks, for those keeping track of such things), I don’t mess with “beauty sleep” anymore. I sleep to escape my aches and pains. Also, my kids.

So this morning when the BEB was up at the crack o’ dawn after a mere 6 hours of sleep, I knew it was going to be a long, miserable day. A day on which I’d be eyeballing the liquor cabinet even as I poured my first cup of coffee. A day on which I’d be lucky to squeeze in a quick shower, all the while knowing that a leisurely bath was out of the question. (Too much temptation to see just how long I could hold my breath before passing out.)

One would think by now that my kids had learned to tell the difference between when Mommy is smiling and when she’s just clenching her teeth. It seems an easy enough distinction to me: the latter is usually accompanied by a loud grinding sound, whereas the former is accompanied by a martini handed to me by my husband… who simultaneously announces that he is taking over parenting duties for the rest of the evening.

One would also think that my kids would realize that just because Mommy’s voice doesn’t sound like she’s about to have an aneurysm doesn’t mean she’s not about to. The clue is s not so much how I say something as what I say.

For instance, if I say: “What would you like for lunch?” it’s a sign I’m feeling a bit flexible. On the other hand: “Do you want chicken strips with fruit salad or leftover scraps of whatever the heck that green thing is underneath your bed?” means it’s probably time to clean underneath their beds. After lunch. Which is going to be chicken strips with fruit salad, so don’t even bother asking for egg salad, got it?

Likewise, our family tends to use lots of pet names for each other: “Sweetie”, “Honey”, “Angel”, “Little Guy” and “You, not not the cat, YOU“. But if Mom calls them by their actual names — not even the first and middle names together, mind you (because both of their middle names are mouthfuls and too much to expect any one frazzled mom to utter when completely and totally stressed out) — that’s a sign they’d better listen up. Now.

But do they get it? The oldest one does, possibly because after surviving sixteen long years (17 next month) she sees the light at the end of the tunnel. (The shadow she sees there is me waving my arms frantically, beckoning her on.) The little one, my Big-Eyed Boy? Clueless.

Witness, for instance, his question of just a few minutes ago after he’d dumped his Matchbox Cars into the machine along with a full bottle of Tide and started flinging the suds everywhere.

“Mommy, why are you counting to ten? Is it because you’re worried you’re so old you might forget how to do it if you don’t practice?”

It’s a good thing my son is so darned cute, I tell you. A very good thing.

The NY Times announced today that teenage boys aren’t necessarily the horny little devils we parents of teenage girls believe they are. According to a “fascinating new report” based on a confidential questionnaire given to 105 10th-grade boys, whose average age was 16, boys are actually motivated by love and a desire to form real relationships.

Which I might buy, if that statement wasn’t followed shortly by this one:

Most of the boys had dating experience, and about 40 percent were sexually active.

And therein lies the problem when you’ve got a 16-year-old girl: knowing which 1 out of every 2.5 boys asking her out hasn’t been laid yet because that’s most likely going to be the guy trying hardest to get into her pants.

The story of Megan Meier, the 13-year-old Missouri girl who committed suicide after being spurned by the person she thought was her online boyfriend, just keeps getting stranger and more infuriating by the moment.

Megan had transferred schools earlier this year after being excluded from the “popular crowd” because she was overweight. In the process, she decided she no longer wanted to maintain some of her old friendships. But at her new school she blossomed, dropping 20 pounds and joining the volleyball team. She even met her first-ever boyfriend, “Josh”, through her MySpace page.

Only problem? Josh was actually 47-year-old Lori Drew, the mother of one of those friends Megan had stop hanging out with, and she was determined to “mess with Megan”. That’s what she told a neighbor, at any rate. What she told the police is that she wanted to gain Megan’s trust so she could find out what Megan was saying online about her own daughter.

So Drew, pretending to be Josh, flirted with Megan for a full month. Then, just as Megan began thinking of herself and Josh as a couple, Drew-as-Josh typed: “I don’t like the way you treat your friends, and I don’t know if I want to be friends with you.” A day later came the fatal message: “The world would be a better place without you.”

Later, Megan told her mother that hateful MySpace messages about her were being posted. Some called her a slut. Some called her fat.

Megan hung herself in her closet. Her mother found the girl and cut her down from the belt she’d wrapped around her own neck. Megan died the next day still believing that her first boyfriend had wholly rejected her.

Megan had been on antidepressants, a fact of which Lori Drew was aware since Megan had previously accompanied the Drews on family vacations. She’d also been diagnosed with ADD and had been under the care of a counselor. But those sensitivities were, apparently, not nearly as important to Lori Drew as teaching Megan a lesson that proved to be fatal.

All of this, because middle-aged Lori Drew couldn’t accept what normal adults figured out long ago: friendships end, and the best way to help our kids when they’ve been dumped by a friend is by helping them learn to make new ones. Megan Meiers mother didn’t get a chance to do that because Lori Drew abdicated her parental role and took matters into her own hands, posing as another child so she could — let’s face it — get petty revenge on the girl who’d hurt her little girl’s feelings.

Meanwhile, there’s nothing the law can do about it. As the St. Charles’ County Sheriff’s Department spokesperson says of Drew’s behavior, “It might’ve been rude, it might’ve been immature, but it wasn’t illegal.”

Ironically, Lori Drew filed a report with the Sheriff’s department against Megan’s parents for damaging a foosball table belonging to the Drews. It seems Megan’s family had agreed to store the table in their garage at Lori’s request. Six weeks after Megan’s death, when they learned that Lori Drew was behind the hoax that led to her suicide, they took a sledgehammer and ax to it and dumped the pieces on the Drew’s driveway.

Yes, you read that right: Lori Drew all but caused Megan Meiers’ suicide, then wanted to press charges against Megan’s family for taking their grief out on a foosball table.

You know, that woman ought to be damned glad she’s not my neighbor. I’d have skipped the table and gone straight after her with the sledgehammer and ax.

Just when the list of recalled toys seems like it couldn’t get any longer, or any more worrisome, comes news that one popular item — Aqua Dots — is actually coated in a substance can make children vomit and render them comatose.

Scientists have found the popular toy’s coating contains a chemical that, once metabolized, converts into the toxic “date rape” drug GHB, or gamma-hydroxy butyrate, U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission spokesman Scott Wolfson told CNN.

“GHB is this drug that in low doses actually causes euphoria,” said Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s chief medical correspondent. “In higher doses, it can cause people to go into a coma. It can cause seizures. It can cause something known as hypotonia, where all your muscles just become very flaccid.

“And it can cause people to become amnestic, … which is why it became a date-rape drug,” Gupta said.

“So this is nasty stuff, and it appears that the chemical is actually converting into it in the body.”

Aqua Dots have been sold in the U.S. since April and had recently made Wal-Mart’s list of “Top 12 Toys”. They are sold in Australia as Bindeez Beads.

Parents are advised to throw the toys out immediately.

If you’ve ever been a “regular” at a bar or other gathering place, you know that sooner or later all of the other bored people around you are going to entertain themselves by opining and speculating on your life since they don’t particularly like their own. Most people just ignore such gossip, find themselves a new watering hole or take up a hobby, like boating, to help them unwind.

I’m guessing one Czechoslovakian couple wishes they’d done that, too:

A Czech couple who decided to take a DNA test to squash persistent pub gossip and prove that their 10-month-old baby was their own got a nasty surprise.

The couple, from the southeastern town of Trebic, had some doubts about the child as her hair was blonde and they both had dark hair. Fellow drinkers’ suspicions got on their nerves.

But the test showed neither of the parents had the same DNA as the baby, Czech news agency CTK reported Wednesday, suggesting a mix-up at the hospital.

Authorities were looking into the case.

If their legal system’s anything like ours, the lawsuit against that hospital’s going to pay for them to start their own bar.

But that doesn’t get their biological baby back, does it?

What would you do if you were in their place: raise the child you’ve thought of as your own for 10 months, or try to find the one that’s actually yours?

I took The Big-Eyed Boy for a toy-shopping trip at the PX earlier this week only to find the toy section crammed with workers busily emptying the shelves. Until then, it hadn’t dawned on me just how enormous the Mattel Toy Fisher-Price recall was until I saw those bare shelves.

Nearly 1 million plastic toys in the U.S. is no small matter, nor are the concerns about protecting children from lead paint, the toxic substance believed to have been used by Chinese manufacturers of the toys.

As I guided my son to another aisle, I passed a woman there with her own kids. She looked as harried as I felt, and nodded toward the clerks pulling boxes of toys from the shelves. “Do they have any idea what kind of a meltdown my kid would have if I took Elmo away from him?” she whined.

She hurried on before I could ask her if she had any idea how much of a meltdown she would have were her kid to get lead poisoning from his beloved Elmo toy and suddenly needed bouts of chelation therapy to save his life.

Sure, her son looked healthy enough but then again Amanda Taylor hadn’t exhibited any signs of lead poisoning when her parents took her in for her routine immunizations. As part of a new protocol, Amanda was given a finger stick blood test to screen for lead. Ordinarily, a count over 10 is serious, while 70 is life-threatening. Amanda’s was 136, and a subsequent x-ray showed lead paint chips in her intestines.

The toddler ended up receiving repeated injections, a much painful process than oral EDTA chelation.

Taylor said her daughter received shots in her thighs every four hours around the clock for six days.

“The medicine they injected is very thick, so it wasn’t like when you get a shot that’s over in a second,” (Amanda’s mother) said. “They actually had to put the needle in and plunge it and it took a bit, and it hurt.

“The first time, it only took one nurse and me to do it. By about the third time, it took four of us to hold her down with all our might. It was rough on everyone to have to do it.”

Although Amanda’s lead levels are now down to 25, she continues to be tested every three months. Her parents have to work closely with a nutritionist to make sure she gets the calcium she needs. They constantly have to monitor her for anemia as well since any form of chelation therapy — including oral chelation — works by binding lead and other metals to dietary iron so the toxins are excreted through the urine.

Amanda continues having trouble sleeping, and her parents say she’s exhibiting aggressive behavior, throwing tantrums and showing both behavioral and social delays — all due to lead poisoning in her system. She’s facing a lifelong struggle, in part because lead remains in bones and tissues even after it’s been removed from the blood.

Just how long she and her parents will be dealing with these problems isn’t clear, but one thing’s for certain: a momentary meltdown over an Elmo doll would’ve been far more simple to deal with.

Kind of makes me wish I could’ve clocked that woman while I had the chance.