Boot Camp

Regarding the Sept. 29 Health article "Pre-Preschool; New Devices Aim to Help Babies Start Learning Before Birth. But Are They Just a Lot of Noise?": Isn't it enough that our society wants children to grow up faster by giving them adult-like schedules at a young age instead of nurturing, listening and fostering natural human development? I'd like to see a longitudinal study of these "womb-schooled" babies all the way through adulthood and compare them with babies who are naturally conceived, nurtured, listened to and cared for responsibly...

Carlos Plata was struggling to dress a Barbie doll. The cyberspace operations planner couldn't get the doll's clothes on correctly. "Hurry up, Dad," his daughter Jacqueline urged. Jacqueline was having wardrobe issues of her own. The 8-year-old looked as though she was being swallowed by the adult-size Army fatigue pants she'd been given to wear for their bizarre race. "That was cool," Jacqueline said as they finished the father-daughter take on a rucksack race. It was a special day for her,...

Company: Washington Real Estate Investment Trust . Location: Rockville. Number of employees: 115. Saman Hussain lost 60 pounds, thanks to the treadmill at work. Now she's toning up with lunch-hour boot camp sessions at the company gym. "I don't have to leave the building or sit in traffic," said Hussain, an administrative assistant. "And it perks me up at lunchtime — that's the best part about it. " The Rockville-based real estate investment trust has been hiring personal trainers to offer boot...

The game the brothers played was simple. Jake and Eugene Mills would stand in the yard and wait for their father to heave a football high into the air. Then they would go after it, one-on-one, battling for bragging rights. They fought often, "like they were mortal enemies," Gene Mills said of his sons, and not just over footballs. But a different dynamic always existed beyond the sibling rivalry: Jake, four years younger, looked up to Eugene, and Eugene, in turn, looked out for...

Q. My 3 1 / 2 -year-old daughter was successfully potty-trained when she went through a three-day diaper-free "boot camp" six months ago. There were very few accidents in the beginning and no accidents since then. I say that there are no "accidents," but my husband and I have had to deal with a lot of "on purposes. " Even though we know that our daughter can control her bladder easily, we've watched her deliberately empty it when she was unhappy with us for putting her in her room for a timeout.

For this small group of fit folks with sunglasses, beach season begins as it always does, a week before Memorial Day in a small bathroom at the 10th Street Medical Center. One by one, a woman in a floral blouse and blue latex gloves calls them in and hands them a sterile cup. It's the first day of the Ocean City Beach Patrol's yearly Surf Rescue Academy, a week-long boot camp for newbie lifeguards. It starts, for rookies and veteran instructors alike, with a drug test. Call it their No. 1...

In one room of the community college in rural central Virginia, students were practicing the basics of woodworking. In another, they were learning how to draw blood for medical tests. In Room 131, students were learning how to analyze national security threats. "Jemaah Islamiyah, a terrorist group based in Indonesia, has been dormant for years, but recent bombings in April and May of this year indicate the resurgence of this group," student Ana Buan said, giving a PowerPoint...

Carlos Plata was struggling to dress a Barbie doll. The cyberspace operations planner couldn't get the doll's clothes on correctly. "Hurry up, Dad," his daughter Jacqueline urged. Jacqueline was having wardrobe issues of her own. The 8-year-old looked as though she was being swallowed by the adult-size Army fatigue pants she'd been given to wear for their bizarre race. "That was cool," Jacqueline said as they finished the father-daughter take on a rucksack race. It was a special day...

"I'm here to be intensely trained," Lee Brenner announced as he came through the door of a discreet building near Dupont Circle. The brick carriage house is usually the headquarters of the Mathematical Association of America, but for a few days in the middle of March, the left-wing organization Media Matters for America converted it into a partisan boot camp where rebel forces were trained for combat on Fox News. Over four grueling days, Harvard-honed instructors...

In the pre-dawn darkness, the gym doors close, and the black women start to move. House versions of Whitney Houston 's "I'm Every Woman," and Adele's "Rolling in the Deep," blare from speakers as the 30 or so women, most with curves, not angles, grab their jump ropes at the L.A. Fitness club in Capitol Heights. They double-time it as fitness instructor Michelle Gibson counts them down from the front of the class. "Four more, three more, two more, one!" she yells,...

For Constellation Theatre's recently opened production of " Zorro ," local fight director Casey Kaleba choreographed a three-person duel, a complex scuffle involving a human shield and an altercation in which the weapon of choice is a bag of change. But a good fight director doesn't merely produce realistic simulations of violence, which is why director and co-writer Eleanor Holdridge keeps collaborating with Kaleba. She can trust him with more than fisticuffs and swordplay.

"Marine Corps veteran" is one of those phrases — like Harvard Business School, West Point, Goldman Sachs and, in Washington, St. John's College High School — that mark a person for me. It doesn't mark someone as necessarily a good person or an asset to society. It doesn't tell me they are philanthropic, or even kind to their mother. It does tell me they accomplished something. Tom Frana, 66, has both St. John's College and Marine Corps veteran on his résumé. I would admire him if he just made...

Expect to pick up more than just weights if you enlist in Thank Dog! Bootcamp , a fitness and obedience program that started up this month in Arlington's Bluemont Park. "We clean up our poop. It's one of the rules of class," says owner and personal trainer Karen Krieg, who'd been looking for a way to merge her two loves: fitness and dogs. She found her inspiration while watching Animal Planet's "Dogs 101. " The show highlighted the work of Thank Dog!, which was founded in Burbank, Calif., in...

As you were getting ready for bed Saturday night, 20 men and one woman were standing in Rock Creek in shorts and T-shirts belting the lyrics to the "SpongeBob SquarePants" theme song into the moonless night. That is, when they weren't face down in the shallow water doing push-ups, or on their backs doing flutter kicks, or crawling on their bellies from the creek into the mud at the water's edge and back in again — all with 40-pound packs on their backs. That was in the first hour or so of their...

When Glenda McQueen worked as a reporter in violence-torn Miami in the 1980s, she sat with grieving relatives of the dead, trying to capture their anguish. "I was an outsider looking in," she said. But in 2006, her son Michael was shot in the head. His roommate was convicted of killing him while he watched television in their Gaithersburg apartment . "It's almost cliche. There's nothing like it. It's the kind of pain that I feel every day and I know people that...

Mobile dating. It's all the horrors of online dating transferred to your phone, where you get creepy texts from people who view your profile and use your location to stalk you. Right? Sometimes, yes. But it could also spontaneously put you in front of the someone who likes your favorite food, books and music and might just like you, too. As a concept, mobile dating isn't really new. It's been around since the invention of mobile phones. Smartphones and apps are just the shiny new tools in the age-old quest for love.

Mobile dating. It's all the horrors of online dating transferred to your phone, where you get creepy texts from people who view your profile and use your location to stalk you. Right? Sometimes, yes. But it could also spontaneously put you in front of the someone who likes your favorite food, books and music and might just like you, too. As a concept, mobile dating isn't really new. It's been around since the invention of mobile phones. Smartphones and apps are just the shiny new tools in the age-old quest for love.

The heart of the Obama administration's strategy for fighting al-Qaeda militants in Somalia can be found next to a cow pasture here, a thousand miles from the front lines. Under the gaze of American instructors, gangly Ugandan recruits are taught to carry rifles, dodge roadside bombs and avoid shooting one another by accident. In one obstacle course dubbed "Little Mogadishu," the Ugandans learn the basics of urban warfare as they patrol a mock city block of tumble-down buildings and rusty shipping...

Company: Washington Real Estate Investment Trust . Location: Rockville. Number of employees: 115. Saman Hussain lost 60 pounds, thanks to the treadmill at work. Now she's toning up with lunch-hour boot camp sessions at the company gym. "I don't have to leave the building or sit in traffic," said Hussain, an administrative assistant. "And it perks me up at lunchtime — that's the best part about it. " The Rockville-based real estate investment trust has been hiring personal trainers to offer boot...

For this small group of fit folks with sunglasses, beach season begins as it always does, a week before Memorial Day in a small bathroom at the 10th Street Medical Center. One by one, a woman in a floral blouse and blue latex gloves calls them in and hands them a sterile cup. It's the first day of the Ocean City Beach Patrol's yearly Surf Rescue Academy, a week-long boot camp for newbie lifeguards. It starts, for rookies and veteran instructors alike, with a drug test. Call it their No. 1...