You’ve read about the Balloon Boy and his nutcase parents – a publicity stunt? really? really??? – till you’re blue in the face. Or apoplectic. Now it’s time to play… The Balloon Boy Game! Chase the balloon, shoot down birds and see how many taxpayer dollars you can waste. Very fun.

Unbelievable. A Michigan stay-at-home-mom was just helping a friend when she offered to watch a neighbor’s kids each morning till the school bus arrived. The bus stop was at the end of her driveway, the neighbor had to leave for work and it was no big deal – less than an hour, no money exchanged, just one mom helping another. Now Lisa Snyder is being threatened with a $1,000 state fine for running an illegal day care facility. The State Dept. of Human Services says legally, anyone who cares for other people’s kids for more than four weeks per year is running a day care facility. And some nasty neighbor must have ratted the family out. Guess it doesn’t take a village to raise a child – only to make helpful moms miserable. Your thoughts?

A new mom in North Dakota apparently went home with the wrong baby. Staffers at the Williston, ND hospital say the error was quickly caught and the mother and correct baby were soon together, but they’re trying to figure out how the mishap occurred. These cases pop up every so often and every time, I’m just flummoxed. Maybe the hospital where I gave birth was really proactive, but I kinda thought it was routine to tag the baby, tag the mother, and compare the tags over and over again, every time mother and child are separated and most certainly when they go home. Plus … they may be wrinkly and squashy, but even newborns look pretty distinctive. C’mon, confession time. Could you tell your baby apart from all the other ones in the nursery?

Well, here’s a new one for the Bad Parenting files. Quebec police just spotted a YouTube video of a family cheering on their newest young driver, a 7 year old tooling down the road in an SUV. Dad’s running the video camera from the passenger seat, mom and the sibs – a little sister, sans seat belt, and older brother – are in the back seat and young Samuel is behind the wheel. Police found the family, thanks to Dad’s extra-descriptive narration… which also urged his little gum-chewing son to look at the camera and smile. Now police are weighing traffic and criminal violations, and child endangerment charges. OK, reality check, people. How old were you when you first drove a car? And what do you think of this?

Wow. Just … wow. We are, er, indebted to our friends over at Parenting.com for introducing us to Hippie Weirdo Yoga Farmers, thus scarring us for life. The section around 2:20-2:40 is particularly memorable. And to think we ever complained about Barney. Or that weird Spongebob Squarebutts video.

You remember that Nebraska Safe Haven Law that yielded unexpected results when parents started abandoning their teens too? One father, Gary Staton, abandoned nine of his ten children. Now comes news that Staton is going to be a father again. Ahem.

After Staton’s wife died of a cerebral aneurysm in 2007, he was left to raise their 10 children, then ages 1, 4, 5, 8, 9, 12, 13, 14, 15 and 16, on his own. But rather than ask family members for help last summer, he told his nine younger children they were going to a grief counseling session at the Creighton University Medical Center and he dumped them there. (By then, the oldest was legally an adult.) Now, Staton’s girlfriend is PREGNANT. And one can only imagine what his other children are thinking.

“So how does a guy who claimed he’d have a vasectomy if he had the thousand dollars end up a father again?” asks StrollerDerby’s Jeanne Sager. “I feel for Staton’s kids… They now have to face the fact that their dad has moved on not from the death of their mother but from THEM.”

ThatsJustNotRight’s Clarissa is blunter, “Anyone got $1000? Or a soldering iron? I figure either one will work just fine.”

Your thoughts?

Oh. My. God. We thought StrollerDerby’s Jeanne Sager was kidding when she said she’d run across a Christian bookstore web site hawking Ku Klux Klan T-shirts for children. Yes, really.  “I’m vacillating between speechless and spitting with venom,” Sager writes. “I’ve got to wonder, honestly, what Klan Kids Kare about. I was thinking Lynching, but according to the t-shirt, they ‘kare’ about loving Jesus, white power and their heritage. Note to the Klan: Jesus lived in the Middle East – it’s highly unlikely that his skin was white. And he certainly wasn’t Aryan.”

Naturally, we went madly Googling to see and yep, Arkansas-based Christian Books and Things sells an entire line of “Knights” shirts – yes, those knights, the ones in white sheets – including one that proclaims “I Want You” above a KKK member pointing, Uncle Sam-like, and another that reads, “The Original Boyz in the Hood” with yes, boys in klan hoods. All available in children’s sizes 2/4, 6/8 and so on, to fit your little budding bigot. Unbelievable.

Your thoughts?

I can’t wait to hear the dad’s explanation. From Union City:

Police: Union City dad fires gun during argument with daughter over prom night

UNION CITY — A father upset with his teenage daughter for being out late on prom night was arrested Monday after he fired a gun during the argument and nearly hit his wife, who jumped in the way to protect their daughter, police said.

Full story

From the Associated Press:

A dispute between two 9-year-old girls in New York has led to criminal charges against one of their mothers after police say she posted a Craiglist ad seeking sex and directed respondents to call the other mother.

Here’s the full story.

OK, we’re putting this in the “What the @%# was she thinking?” category. A Brentwood teen had to be airlifted to a local hospital last night after she ran over herself with her own car. The 17-year-old was “ghost riding” – a car stunt that is popular among East Bay teens and, apparently, morons. You think we’re being rude? That this was some unavoidable accident? Ghost riding involves a car owner walking or dancing ON TOP of a moving, driverless car – on the hood, the roof or the running board – while clowning around. It’s a stunt made famous by E-40, a Vallejo rapper’s 2006 song, “Tell Me When to Go.” In this case, the girl had her tunes turned up, and was happily dancing on the outside running board of her 1980s model Chevvy blazer as it cruised along, driverless. She slipped, fell and the car ran over her thighs. Her injuries are serious but she’s expected to recover. Whether she’ll recover from her lifelong grounding is still up in the air.

Add this one to the list of “Things I never thought I’d need to warn my kid not to do…”