Where is Covid Baby Boom?

 Surprise, surprise. the Pandemic, Covid 19, is not causing a baby boom. No one is more surprised than me. I would have bet money that mandatory isolation would lead to the increase of pregnancies and births. Studies have shown people put off having children during this time leading to a decline in births. Scientists say maybe people put off having children due to the uncertainty of what Covid was, its effects, and not knowing how long it would last. Some scientists believe it was due to job uncertainty and economic instability. I believe because teenagers were limited to the home, they were not out doing the "nasty" dropping the pregnancy and birth rate.

    I am a mother of three. I think three is a nice number of children. Not too many. Not too few. But did I pick the number of children I had? Well, yes and no. And yes, it is a personal story that would fall under TMI- too much information. Am I happy to have my three children? Beyond all of the words in the world.

    I could spend all day wondering what kind of mother I would have been to one child or ten children. I am sure the answer would be I would be a different kind of mother based on the number of children I chose to have. I might have had more patience or less patience who knows but I would have loved them all the best I could and fully.

    You see some people with various numbers of children feel they have fulfilled their duty of having every child God wanted them to have without doing anything to hamper the process. And you have people at this moment trying to encourage women to have children by using laws.

     I believe everyone is familiar with the Duggars who have welcomed every child into their home as a gift and share love in amounts one would not believe possible with little effort. Some judge the Duggars as foolish or as upstanding examples of living out their faith. I think they should be viewed as their children and family view them - loved.

    Michelle Duggar wants her stillborn baby, Jubilee, to know "You were not loved any less because you were baby number 21.” Duggar shares her message of love for the “precious baby girl” she miscarried in an “audio letter” posted on the Duggar family website. When asked how many children she has, "The answer will be 21. Nineteen here, and two in Heaven,” she says in the message. In her message, Duggar says the name Jubilee Shalom means “joyful celebration of peace” and that the baby will serve as a reminder of the fragility of life and the importance of family.

    I have an opinion about the number of children Mrs. Duggar has decided to have, but my opinion does not matter. It adds nothing to their family nor takes anything away from their family. My little opinion is irrelevant to their lives and happiness, and I am so happy it is so. Who am I to insert myself into their lives in word or deed? 

    And now we come to 'man' trying to tell women how many children to have and not have. SHOCKER ALERT every person on earth is not a Christian and why are you trying to force them to live Christian lives when Jesus never forced anyone to be a Christian. I think Judas would have been the first-person Jesus would have forced to do the moral and ethical thing according to his religious beliefs. But that did not happen, did it?

    So, what is going on? The big joke going around is that even the pope cannot get his followers to follow their faith's rules against contraceptives, because they (Catholics) have more cars than children. But I also see many people who have been fruitful and multiplied and are still in the single digit numbers 5-7, which by the way, seems to be the ideal number and then - BOOM - no more children. As Mrs. Duggar has demonstrated, fertility has a long window for double digit pregnancies and births. So, is single digit number of children meeting the being fruitful threshold? 

    The number of Christians having Christian babies should be higher and then the number of Christians in America would be very high and this need to step in with laws banning contraceptives would not be occurring. But reality will always rear its ugly head. Someone is not practicing what they are preaching or legislating.

    HOW DO WE GET CONTROL OF THE UTERUS? Possession is 9/10th of the law people or so I have heard. I have never actually read a law that says such. But decisions are being made about the number of children a family is going to have. So, with my three children should I look down on the person with one child, 21 children, or no children? Or should I let others live and answer for their own choices in regard to the size of their family? 

    Do you believe the pope would issue out punishment, if he could, for the estimated 98% of Catholic women who admit to using some sort of birth control at some point in their lives? If this is a religious commandment; why isn't the church handling it for the Christian people who have agreed to adhere to the tenants of their faith. This is for all Protestant faiths also.

Here are a few facts I found interesting from another site I thought you might find interesting
http://www.squidoo.com/strange-parenting-facts

    Historians believe that Mulai Ismail, second ruler of the Moroccan Alaouite dynasty, may have sired an estimated 888 children through 500 wives. In order to attain that number of children, he would have had to copulate with an average of 1.2 women per day over 60 years. That is one busy man!

    Speaking of fathers, I have always thought it strange that the world's record for the most children born to one woman was not listed under the woman's name, but her husbands. According to records the first wife of Russian peasant Feodor Vassilyev who died in 1782 gave birth to an astounding 69 children. 

     In the day of 27 February 1782, the list from Nikolskiy monastery came to Moscow containing the information that a peasant of the Shuya district, Feodor Vassilyev married twice and had 87 children. His first wife in 27 confinements gave birth to all of these children. Between 1725 and 1765 she gave birth to 16 sets of twins, 7 sets of triplets, and 4 sets of quadruplets! She was pregnant a total of 27 times, and 67 of those children survived infancy. Yet no record of the wife was ever kept, her name, date of birth and dates of death are not included in any of the record books. He went on to remarry and eventually sired another 20 children for a total of 87 children. Cause of his firsts wife's death was presumably exhaustion if you ask me.

    The world's record for the youngest mother belongs to Lina Medina who was not yet six years old when she gave birth to her son Gerardo.

    The family of Lina Medina believed that she had a tumor when they first took her to see doctors, that tumor turned out to be a healthy six-pound baby boy she named Gerardo. Lina was born in Paurange, Peru and gave birth to her son at the age of 5 years, 7 months, and 21 days old. After the baby was delivered Lina Medina returned home with Gerardo, now being raised as her younger brother. She showed little interest in the baby though, preferring dolls to playing with her son.

    Puzzled doctors continued to study Lina Medina to find out how this could have happened. It was eventually discovered that she suffered from a hormone condition known as "Precocious Puberty" that caused extremely early development. She began menstruating regularly at the age of 8 months (some sources state 3 years).

    For a time, Lina's own father was held on a suspected charge of incest, until blood tests ruled him out. When questioned about the father's identity, Lina was unable to give clear answers due to her young age, so nobody was ever charged. The identity of the father was never discovered. Lina Medina is still alive today and went on to live a relatively normal life. She still refuses to do media interviews. Her son Gerardo was killed in a motorcycle accident as a young adult

    Mrs. Rajo Devi gave birth to a healthy baby girl in 2008 at the ripe young age of 70 years old. She and her husband have named the child Naveen. The Indian couple had tried for many years to have a child, finally resorting to in-vitro fertilization. The mothers real age is at question as many in rural India do not have birth certificates, she believes she is 70, but her husband believes that she is 72. She is believed to be the oldest mother ever to give birth, but this cannot be confirmed.

    Women, as the carrier and deliverer of children should have a say, if not the only say, on how they want their body to operate or not operate. Having children takes a toll on the body and causes lasting changes. There is a small percentage of marriages adhering to the Christian mandate to be fruitful and multiply. Advances in science has given women many tools to use when making health choices and decisions. Access to medical treatments should not be restricted for women. Men do not have medical therapies and treatments restricted for them. If the childbearing issue (even contraception availability to women) is a big priority and regulated through laws of medical availability and usage, then condoms and Viagra medication and treatment should be regulated for being connected with childbearing. There should be interference on the men's side also and dictate their ability to reproduce or not reproduce. 

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How to Fashion Style a Recession

 

Attention fashion and style bloggers did you know this theory/fact?

My mind started to reach a foggy fact I had heard somewhere at some time about the economy having an effect on whether women wore the hemline of their skirts or dresses longer or shorter depending on the economic climate.

The news article, I was trying to remember, if memory serves me correctly, stated that dress length/economy correlation was first propounded by US economist George Taylor in the 1920s.


During the Great Depression, hemlines reached as far as the ankles

Taylor argued that women wore shorter skirts in boom times because they could afford expensive silk stockings and wanted to show them off. During a recession, however, the skirts grew longer, because the women couldn’t afford stockings and wanted to hide the fact that they weren’t wearing any.

The story said Taylor’s theory had been surprisingly accurate. In the 1920s, 1960s and 1980s, which were boom times in the US, hemlines rose. On the other hand, they reached down as far as the ankles during the Great Depression.

The stock market’s measure of consumer confidence has far-reaching implications. Fashions, such as women’s hem lines, tend to follow the market (high hem lines and high stock prices imply confidence in various areas of life). Movies such as the gangster movies of the 1930s, Godfather style movies of the 1960s, and Batman or Darkman in 1990, follow the stock market contractions of the same periods. Financial indicators such as home construction and buying, auto and major appliance purchases, vacations, etc. all follow the stock market cycles, and in fact stock market trends measure the confidence and psychological attitudes of peoples (including those who are not investors), and thus provides a convenient and concurrent mathematical measure of attitudes and a wide range of economic, political, and societal events.


So, with all of the economic turmoil going on in America these days, will we see longer dresses on an everyday basis? We have already poked fun at Target for its prairie looking dresses offered to their consumer. And with goods not reaching stores due to lack of workers to off load them at ports, the selection of clothes to purchase has dwindled in stores. I have noticed the change and rearrangement of store floorplans in an effort to camouflage the lack of selection of clothes. 

Add the addition of masks to style and fewer people working and socializing, has fashion taken a downward turn along with hemlines?

In 2008 this was the question on the mind of almost all fashion designers. What will women want to wear during our economic downturn? 

This is what fashion had to say about the rise and fall of hemlines, "The oldest adage about fashion and the economy is that hemlines rise and fall with the stock market. In the boom times of the 20s and the 60s, skirts were short; in the 30s and 40s, they fell. Except that, on closer inspection, even this most famous theory fails to hold water. During the wartime years, arguably the period of greatest privation in modern history, hemlines were shorter than before or after the war; in the recession of the early 90s, hemlines fell. We cannot rely on skirt length alone to track the economy through fashion."

After 9/11, upscale New York boutiques reported a surge in demand for lower-heeled shoes: on the shopfloor, they said, women were explaining they wanted shoes they could run in if necessary. The financial crisis has not had the same effect: "heel heights have been rising steadily for several years, and look set to continue their skyward trajectory next season."


Betty Jackson keeps it simple. Illustration: Betty Jackson, "a downbeat stock market is not necessarily reflected in downbeat clothes."

Indeed, according to fashion historian Valerie Steele, "this whole idea that fashion is a 'reflection' of the economy is a misnomer. It would be more accurate to say that fashion and art are as much a part of living history as the economy is." What happens on Wall Street, says Steele, "is mediated through the manners and mores of the time before influencing the fashion aesthetic. In the 60s, for instance, what impacted fashion was not so much a booming economy as "the anti-conventional youth movement" which flourished in a booming economy.

The hemlines theory was invented back in the 1920s. But it just doesn't hold up. Take the 20s - hemlines actually began to fall in 1927, two years before the crash. They were falling by 1969, two years before the downturn of 1971," says Steele. 

In many cases, fashion designers appear to have an ability to read the writing on the wall, without waiting for the newspaper headlines. Between 1936 and 1939 fashion began to pick up on the rumble of warmongering, with military-inspired square shoulders teamed with lower heels. Even nightgowns sported three-inch shoulder pads. At other times, we may misinterpret clothes in retrospect in the light of world events. Christian Dior is usually credited with grasping the mood of the moment with his joyous, full-skirted Corolle collection of 1947, which launched Dior's New Look - but in 1939, before the outbreak of war, the Paris collections of Chanel and Mainbocher were both modelled on a full skirt and a wasp waist. With the war came a dampener on fashion, and the trend did not catch on until Dior revisited it.

Rosemary Harden, curator of the Fashion Museum in Bath, agrees that the notion of a catwalk aesthetic which straightforwardly reflects the economy "feels quite glib. It's much more complex than that, and I think it's important to unpack it a bit. The 20s and 60s were a time not just of boom but of liberation. The short skirts of the 20s were driven as much by the rise of sportswear as by the stock market. The sense of liberation cut across the social spectrum - there are photos of my grandma in south-east London wearing short, knitted skirts. The 20s, like the 60s, was a time of opportunity, a time of people not feeling shackled. Opportunity led to newness and experimentation. It is connected to a buoyant economy, but the link is not as direct as people imagine."

Simon Doonan, creative director of Barneys department store in New York and author of the memoir Beautiful People, is rather blunter. The notion of fashion design reflecting the economic mood is "a total fallacy. Fashion people live in a creative hermetic bubble and are rarely so tuned in to the political or financial vicissitudes of the world. The idea that they might have a Dr Strangelove conclave where they confer about hemlines and the economy is hilarious." Nonetheless, he says, "there is one certainty about recession, which is that fashionistas will buy less - by which I mean one pair of Louboutins instead of three."

It seems we are in tune with Doonan, whose advice to customers "is always to dress up rather than down, in tough times. You owe it to your pals, family and colleagues to present yourself in an optimistic and fabulous way. Remember what Quentin Crisp said? 'When war broke out, I bought five pounds of henna.' "

So, there you have it. Women will do what they want to do when it comes to fashion. Whether the hemlines grow longer or get shorter; the point will always be - to look fabulous.