This whole conversation sucks.

My five year old swims in the deep end. He's been swimming since he was a toddler. Without any sort of floatie/vest since he was a young four. He can also do the six foot high balance beam at gymnastics, climb to the top of the rock wall, etc. Seriously, I get so tired of people who obviously have no clue about kids or parenting criticizing parents all the time. It's fvcking hard people!

I didn't want to go in any pool for a while when I was a lil kid, because of a news story about this kind of thing.

Amen to that!

hence, why I decided to stick with dogs.

Back to the pool issue... Not that I feel strongly either way about a new law for pool owners, but the linked stories remind me about a moment I had on our family vacation this year.

We were sitting by the pool at the hotel, and I started reading Chuck Palahniuk's "Haunted", one of the books from my "get around to sometime" pile. Unlike "Fight Club", "Choke" and "Lullaby," this book is a collection of linked short stories... most of them pretty darn gruesome.

One of the early stories involves a character who uses the drain of the pool for his own pleasure, until something horrible happens.

I actually got physically ill and had to put the book down for almost a half hour.

3-year-old Hitler can't get name on cake

I have no words

Really, to think a store would do that to a 3-year-old.

Interestingly I don't think he's quite understanding the nature of the controversy yet. I don't think it is blacks, specifically, that would have the most issue with a friend named Adolf Hitler.

It is hard to take at face value the statement that he picked the name just because it was nice sounding and would be unique but then has apparently requested a swastika on the cake in the past (and named another child after Aryan Nation).

So, I guess I can understand both sides. Yeah, I'd probably go ahead and make the cake but it would be borderline. I don't buy for a moment that no political statement was being made when they chose the name of this child and I don't really have a problem if others choose to not participate in making that statement.

My mom owns a seamstress shop I don't know that she'd be eager to make the young child's klan hood for his 4th birthday costume party.

Say what you will about Hitler . . .