From TODAY producer Stephanie Becker

You may have seen the hit MTV show “16 & Pregnant,” about teenagers who are unexpectedly expecting. Watching the sacrifices and hardships and the emotional, financial and physical challenges these girls face is enough to make any teenager wear a full body condom.

I say that even though I am the product of a teen mom. She was 19 years old. In her defense, two weeks before she got pregnant she married my dad. Really. I did the math — twice. Why do you think she made him marry her? Then, like millions of other girls, she gave up her college education to raise a family. Personally, I think it was an excellent choice. But, as she approaches 70, I do think she will always regret it. And she tried to make sure I did not follow in her footsteps. Why didn’t I?

First, a grateful acknowledgement to my my high school fifth-period Health Science teacher Mr. Eddings and his dexterity at the filmstrip projector; if only he could have played a couple of DVDs of MTV's "16 & Pregnant," everyone would have stayed awake. And a virgin.

Who said parenting was stressful?! According to a new study in the Annals of Behavioral Medicine, people with children have significantly lower blood pressure than those without. It seems that throughout the hectic schedules, constant worrying and lunch-packing, parents are able to find a certain calm and fulfillment in raising their kids. Not surprisingly, this effect is found more in mothers than fathers.

"Women were driving the effect," says co-author Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a psychologist at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. "Women with children had the lowest blood pressure, and women without had the highest."

From Laura T. Coffey, TODAYshow.com contributor

I've never been a real food snob, but living in the Pacific Northwest for many years has rubbed off on me in this undeniable way: I now have a deep and abiding love for good coffee and good beer.

It's funny because I don't drink very much of either beverage. (I couldn't even if I wanted to, for reasons that will soon become apparent.) But the time I do spend drinking good coffee or good beer is an EVENT. Something to be savored. Something to be planned around, even. This is serious business!

Or it had been, at least. Until I had a kid.

It literally took months for me to awaken enough from my sleep-deprived stupor to realize the new pattern that was afflicting me, not just every now and then, but every single day. Each morning I would pour myself a cup of coffee and doctor it up in just the right way, with a little bit of sugar and milk. Then I'd begin tending to my infant son. (As the months wore on, he transformed into a toddler son.) Rush-rush-rush, hustle-bustle-hustle-bustle ... and then I'd finally remember my neglected cup of coffee and take a sip.

"Oh no!" I would think. "It's cold." (Not just lukewarm, by the way. COLD.)

Good coffee ain't cheap, so I'd nuke my cup and soldier on. And then it would get cold – again!

That's when I'd reach a crossroads: Do I nuke it a second time?

I'm frugal, and I already feel guilty enough about the money we spend on coffee, so you can guess what I've been doing. And I'm here to report that thrice-nuked coffee is DISGUSTING, no matter how good the pot was when it was fresh. The milk in it even starts to curdle into solid little doohickeys that float along the top. (Why does THAT have to happen??)

I also can tell you that coffee sitting in a pot for seven-plus hours doesn't taste that great by the time naptime finally rolls around, either – no matter how much you've been waiting to savor it.

I often encounter a photo-negative of the exact same problem in the evenings with beer – not every day of the week, as happens with the coffee, but often enough to notice a pattern. In a spirit of generosity, my husband will crack open a frosty Sierra Nevada for himself and grab one for me too. That open beer bottle will sit there, forlorn and increasingly dripping with condensation, from approximately 6:45 until 9:15 p.m. when I can finally sit down. That's when the beer and I come face to face with one another – and again, I reach a crossroads.

"Hey Michael," I'll say to my husband. "If I put this back in the fridge, will you drink it when it turns cold again?"

"Why would I want to drink an open beer?" he'll say. "I'll just get a new one."

"But this is a perfectly good beer. It just needs to turn cold again."

"Why don't you drink it?"

"I don't think I'll last that long. I think I'll be sleeping by the time it finally turns cold."

And so it comes to pass that on many a weekday morning, I find a bottle of cold Sierra Nevada sitting open on a refrigerator shelf, losing precious fizziness and zip. I'll feel so cut to the heart by this sight that I'll cover the top of the bottle with plastic wrap or tin foil and vow to drink it that night at approximately 9:15 p.m.

It's so nice to have treats like this to look forward to at the end of a long day, isn't it, moms? :-)

Plenty of married and committed women have a silly crush (on their delivery man, favorite celebrity, etc), but at what point does it start being inappropriate? Or does fantasizing about someone else actually help your relationship? Weigh in.

It seems shallow to complain about not getting the gender you wanted when a baby arrives; many pregnant women are conditioned to say they’ll be happy with whatever they get. But even though the issue of gender disappointment isn’t talked about very much, it shouldn’t be shrugged off. Having spent months anticipating a specific outcome in the delivery room, some new moms are devastated over the sex of their new baby — but they feel they can’t say anything about it, lest they seem completely ungrateful for the gift of a healthy child.

In an Associated Press report, one mother described her heartbreak upon giving birth to a son:

“You're kind of bummed in the back of your mind. There's not going to be any pink dresses. There's not going to be any scrapbooking. That's not going to happen," [Christine Lich] said.

Lich gets tired of people making comments such as: "Are you going to try for the girl?" or "You need to have the girl." Even now, four years after her third child, she can't bring herself to buy clothes for a little girl's birthday because she just can't look at the outfits.

Lich’s experience might seem extreme to some, but it does touch upon a rather taboo topic — moms expressing any type of disappointment over a child’s gender without an army of naysayers screaming “Be thankful you even have a baby!”

The former beauty queen rose to become an Alaskan governor and a vice-presidential candidate – the second woman to ever run on a major U.S. party ticket -- all while raising five children. Is she a feminist who proves you can do it all? Or did she let the women of America down? Share your thoughts.

From reporter (and mom) Adrienne Mand Lewin

When it comes to relying on the Web for information, I am far from a novice. I’m a journalist who has spent most of my career writing and reporting online. I frequently make purchases from large retailers, and I’ve bought and sold things on Craigslist. I don’t know how I got through life before there was Google.

Yet when I needed insight regarding my two young kids, the last place I turned to was the Web.

Sure, when I was pregnant I faithfully read sites like BabyCenter and iVillage and found them to be really helpful. But despite all the Web sites, blogs and groups devoted to being a parent, I didn’t think it would be for me. I pictured a world of judgment, snarky comments and criticism, where in anonymity strangers would feel free to offer their opinions in a way that the common courtesy of a conversation at the playground excludes. No, thanks.

What I found in reporting my story about motherhood and community for the TODAYMoms.com launch was actually the opposite. Women are finding support, comfort and friendship among their online peers that supplement their real-world relationships, and in some cases fill a void that those can’t offer. A lot of moms are taking their correspondences offline and making friends they wouldn’t have met if they hadn’t replied to someone’s question or post. And just the feeling of not being alone in their experiences as mothers is reassuring for many.

I don’t know that I’ll become the most active member of any groups or loyal reader of a particular blog. But next time one of my little guys does something strange that I’m sure no other child has ever done, chances are I won’t hesitate to look to other moms in cyberspace who can tell me what’s up. What about you?

Read Adrienne's full article, Motherhood 2.0: It takes an (online) village, on TODAYshow.com.