Young Boys

It's 4 p.m., twilight's witching hour, and children all over America are starting to get restless. Here in my house it's fairly quiet. I'm making dinner with one son, age 4, who is whisking the oil and vinegar for a salad dressing. My other two boys, ages 5 and 2, are in the family room. One is playing with Legos; the other is listening to a CD and reading a comic book. There is no television blaring in the family room, no Sesame Street video teaching them their letters. There never is. And five years into this "zero-TV experiment" my husband and I embarked on, there never has been.

LOS ANGELES -- It didn't take long for Jerry Jones, the enthusiastic owner of the Dallas Cowboys, to start bragging.In the giddy moments Sunday night after the Cowboys' 52-17 rout of the Buffalo Bills in Super Bowl XXVII, Jones talked about how young the team is."We're looking forward to seeing what they're able to play like when they get a little experience under their belts," he said.He repeated that theme at a news conference yesterday. The team owners don't usually show up at the news conferences the day after the Super Bowl, but Jones isn't your average owner.

It wasn't until after Felicia Smith had chased the man down and helped pry her screaming son from his grip that she realized how close she had come to losing her 3-year-old boy."I thank God because he spared my child," Mrs. Smith said yesterday. "If [the man] had had a car, he would have been gone."Instead, Bruce Green, 29, of the 3900 block of Dudley Avenue, was being held last night on charges of kidnapping and assault at the Eastern District lockup. Bail was set by a Baltimore District Court commissioner at $7,000, and he is scheduled for a bail review hearing today, police said.

Q: My 21-month-old son was born with undescended testicles. What is the chance his testicle will come down on its own?A: A testicle which hasn't made its way into the scrotum by the time a child is 1 or 2 years old is unlikely to "come down" on its own. We can surmise this from studies which have been done comparing the number of undescended testicles in groups of male infants, boys and young men.Two or three out of 10 boys born prematurely have undescended testicles...

A Pennsylvania man pleaded guilty Thursday to violating federal child pornography laws by videotaping the genitals of unsuspecting young boys earlier this year, as they used urinals in the bathrooms at the I-95 rest stops in Harford and Cecil counties. Brian Matthew Williams, 28, of West Chester, Pa., pleaded guilty to receipt of child pornography in Baltimore Federal District County, according to a news release from the office of Maryland U.S. Attorney Rod J. Rosenstein. According to a statement of facts attached to his plea agreement, on May 6, 2012, Williams spent nearly five hours at the Maryland House rest stop near Aberdeen and the Chesapeake House rest stop near North East going in and out of the men's restrooms filming several minor males, most of whom were prepubescent, as they used the urinals.

William Boulay is only 4, but he knows he will never eat solid food, must always wear a colostomy bag, be accompanied by a nurse and keep a tube in his chest that connects him to a computer-assisted feeding pump.The boy and his parents will ask an Anne Arundel Circuit Court jury this week for millions of dollars in damages for the near-fatal injuries he suffered at the Glen Burnie Holiday Inn pool in 1995.Gary and Lisa Boulay of the 800 block of Jack St. in Baltimore filed a $222 million negligence suit against the motel operators and pool maintenance firm last year, two weeks after their son had much of his intestines sucked out when he become trapped against the drain in the motel wading pool.

The squeegee kid says he was was washing car windshields the other day when a man approached and asked if he wanted to make some "big money."The boy, 12, who lives in a West Baltimore public-housing development, had seen the man before in the courtyard of the project and knew what the offer involved -- joining a drug organization."

Any day now, hordes of cicadas will emerge from 17 years underground to begin their noisy mating ritual. Most of us are not "bug people," so we're not looking forward to having thousands of cicadas everywhere. We may be disgusted or even afraid. The last time the cicadas were here, in 1987, Betty West of Elkridge was intrigued enough by what she calls the "benign plague" to keep a written record. The reason was her 4-year-old grandson, James. The cicadas "were totally engrossing for him," says West, 69, who now lives in Berlin, on the Eastern Shore.

A Sykesville chiropractor and his wife who were arrested last week on drug charges say they were the unwitting victims of a friend who had been living in their home.Howard County police arrested Steven Craig Boesche, 39, of the 13800 block of Forsythe Road and four others, including his wife, Michelle Marie Boesche, 27, during a series of raids Nov. 4. A housemate, Taoufik Benhamd Salah, who police describe as a )) key figure in the ring, also was arrested."I'm not involved with this conspiracy," Mr. Boesche said.

SANTA MARIA, Calif. -- Michael Jackson's former maid, who changed his sheets, washed his laundry and even cleaned up after his chimpanzee, testified yesterday that she once saw him showering with a 7-year-old boy. The woman, whose son told jurors Monday that Jackson fondled him three times when he was young, said she walked into the star's bedroom suite at Neverland one day in 1989 and heard laughter and running water. She said she peeked inside the bathroom and, through a foggy shower door, saw an image of Jackson and what appeared to be a young boy. On the floor outside the shower door, she said, were Jackson's underwear, white briefs, alongside "little green underwear.