A Children’s Book About Mommy’s Plastic Surgery

A new picture book about plastic surgery aims to explain why mom is getting a flatter tummy and a ‘prettier’ nose.”My Beautiful Mommy” (Big Tent Books) is available this Mother’s Day. It features a perky mother explaining to her child why she’s having cosmetic surgery (a nose job and tummy tuck). Naturally, it has a happy ending: mommy winds up “even more” beautiful than before, and her daughter is thrilled.

Some, upon reading the manuscript with their son, find it useful. Newsweek reports “Since February, when she had the surgery, she and [her son] have read the book a half dozen times, and she says it helped him feel excited rather than scared. “I didn’t want him to think [the surgery] was because I was hurting. It was to make me feel good,” she says.”

“That message seems to have gotten through. Instead of being uncomfortable about the surgery, Acosta says her son actually spoke up about it at a big party. “Did you see her new belly button? It’s so pretty!” he said of his mom. “I think he was proud,” she says.”

Blog to Death?

A few weeks ago, Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41,survived a heart attack in December.

According to this article by New York Times, many bloggers are suffering from sleep disorders, exhaustion and other types of non-stop strain of producing blog entries.

To make you feel better, it also says “To be sure, there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic. There is also no certainty that the stress of the work contributed to their deaths. But friends and family of the deceased, and fellow information workers, say those deaths have them thinking about the dangers of their work style.”

So I guess we don’t have to worry, yet.