Happy Mutha’s Day

As I noted on Facebook the odds are staggeringly in favor of the fact that your loving and nurturing mother has been auditioning finger puppets while reading 50 Shades of Grey. People don’t like to think of their moms like that but if your mom didn’t do the mattress mambo you wouldn’t be here. So while you’re taking her to a champagne brunch and ordering a chocolate croissant for her you might want to invest in a gift certificate from Taboo-Tabou. I mention this since I have been recently dating a mom. It’s okay, she’s divorced and everything. Her kids, both teens, know, intellectually, that we do more than play Canasta and go to church, but they really, REALLY, do not want to consider it. I can’t say I blame them. I wouldn’t want to imagine me naked either. But, since I have made them breakfast on a couple of occasions, the subject has been broached. Oddly enough, completely out of character for me, it was dealt with delicately. Without a single mention of mom’s finger puppets. Those dazzlingly deft digits that ….. umm, never mind.

Anyway, as you may have guessed, today is Mother’s Day. The nice people over at 1011 – no, I have no idea what they do – have put together a compendium of useless trivia about Mother’s Day.

So, allow me to share it with you.

On Mother’s Day

• Anna Jarvis of Philadelphia who started Mother’s Day celebrations also filed a lawsuit in an effort to stop the over- commercialisation of Mother’s Day. She lost her fight. Anna had hoped for a day of reflection and quiet prayer by families, thanking God for all that mothers had done.
• Julia Ward Howe staged an unusual protest for peace in Boston, by celebrating a special day for mothers. She wanted to call attention to the need for peace by pointing out mothers who were left alone in the world without their sons and husbands after the bloody Franco Prussian War.
• Japan’s Imperial family trace their ancestry to Omikami Amaterasu, the Mother of the World.
• Ancient Egyptians believed that ‘Bast’ was the mother of all cats on Earth, and that cats were sacred animals.
• In the Bible, Eve is credited with being the ‘Mother of All the Living.’
• In the vast majority of the world’s languages, the word for “mother” begins with the letter M.

Believe It or Not Records:

Youngest Mother
The youngest mother whose history is authenticated is Lina Medina, who delivered a 6½-pound boy by cesarean section in Lima, Peru in 1939, at an age of 5 years and 7 months. The child was raised as her brother and only discovered that Lina was his mother when he was 10.

Oldest Mother
On April 9, 2003, Satyabhama Mahapatra, a 65-year-old retired schoolteacher in India, became the world’s oldest mother when she gave birth to a baby boy. Satyabhama and her husband had been married 50 years, but this is their first child. The baby was conceived through artificial insemination using eggs from the woman’s 26-year-old niece, Veenarani Mahapatra, and the sperm of Veenarani’s husband.

Most Surviving Children
Bobbie McCaughey is the mother who holds the record for the most surviving children from a single birth. She gave birth to the first set of surviving septuplets – four boys and three girls -on November 19, 1997, at the University Hospital, Iowa, US. Conceived by in vitro fertilization, the babies were delivered after 31 weeks by cesarean in the space of 16 minutes. The babies are named Kenneth, Nathaniel, Brandon, Joel, Kelsey, Natalie and Alexis.

Shortest Interval Between Two Children
Jayne Bleackley is the mother who holds the record for the shortest interval between two children born in separate confinements. She gave birth to Joseph Robert on September 3, 1999, and Annie Jessica Joyce on March 30, 2000. The babies were born 208 days apart.

Longest Interval Between Two Children
Elizabeth Ann Buttle is the mother who holds the record for the longest interval between the birth of two children. She gave birth to Belinda on May 19,1956 and Joseph on November 20, 1997. The babies were born 41 years 185 days apart. The mother was 60 years old when her son Joseph was born.

Highest Recorded Number of Children
The highest officially recorded number of children born to one mother is 69, to the first wife of Feodor Vassilyev (1707-1782) of Shuya, Russia. Between 1725 and 1765, in a total of 27 confinements, she gave birth to 16 pairs of twins, seven sets of triplets, and four sets of quadruplets. 67 of them survived infancy.

Highest Number of Children in Modern Times
The modern world record for giving birth is held by Leontina Albina from San Antonio, Chile. Leontina claims to be the mother of 64 children, of which only 55 of them are documented. She is listed in the 1999 Guinness World Records but dropped from later editions.

On Women and Motherhood:

• 24.8 is the median age of women when they give birth for the first time – meaning one-half are above this age and one-half are below. The median age has risen nearly three years since 1970.
• A woman becomes pregnant most easily at the age of eighteen or nineteen, with little real change until the mid twenties. There is then a slow decline to age thirty-five, a sharper decline to age forty-five and a very rapid decline as the women nears menopause.
• The odds of a woman delivering twins is 1 in 33. Her odds of having triplets or other multiple births was approximately 1 in 539.
• When the female embryo is only six weeks old, it makes preparations for her motherhood by developing egg cells for future offspring. (When the baby girl is born, each of her ovaries carries about a million egg cells, all that she will ever have).
• August is the most popular month in which to have a baby, with more than 360,000 births taking place that month in 2001.
• Tuesday is the most popular day of the week in which to have a baby, with an average of more than 12,000 births taking place on Tuesdays during 2001.

Strange But True about Celebrity Moms and Kids

• Katherine Hepburn’s father was a surgeon and her mother was a dedicated suffragette and early crusader for birth control.
• Elvis Presley, was a mama’s boy. He slept in the same bed with his mother, Gladys, until he reached puberty. Up until Elvis entered high school, she walked him back and forth to school every day and made him take along his own silverware so that he wouldn’t catch germs from the other kids. Gladys forbade young Elvis from going swimming or doing anything that might put him in danger. The two of them also conversed in a strange baby talk that only they could understand.
• Many of the sweaters worn by Mr. Rogers on the popular television show, Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, were actually knitted by his real mother.
• Eric Clapton was born to an unwed mother and to shield him from the shame, Eric grew up believing that his grandparents were his parents and his mother was his sister.

From the Animal Kingdom:

• A female oyster over her lifetime may produce over 100 million young.
• A mother giraffe often gives birth while standing, so the new born’s first experience outside the womb is a 1.8-meter (6-foot) drop.
• Just like people, mother chimpanzees often develop lifelong relationships with their offspring.
• Kittens are born both blind and deaf, but the vibration of their mother’s purring is a physical signal that the kittens can feel – it acts like a homing device, signaling them to nurse.

Source: MothersDayCelebration.com

See? Aren’t you glad you’re not a female oyster?

Anyway, from all of us here at the World News Center to all you muthas who read this stuff, Happy Day!