We have a bad habit of hitting the snooze button 20 times before getting up, perhaps we should get a snake instead.

A teenage girl in Australia awoke when a snake slithered into her bed, wrapped itself around her neck and bit her on the arm.

Ashlee Findlay, 16, who is afraid of snakes, spiders and centipedes, spent two hours at a hospital after the attack, the Northern Territory News reported Tuesday.

The receptionist said she would be haunted by the incident. “Everyone was a bit freaked,” she said.

Oh, really? You think?

A 15-year-old boy in North Dakota was accidentally shot to death by his 10-year-old brother while out hunting. That kid is going to need some heavy duty therapy…

Dunn County officials say the brothers were hunting with other family members during the state’s special youth pheasant hunting season Sunday afternoon.

15-year-old Dillen Bloomgren was taken to St. Joseph’s Hospital in Dickinson where he was prounounced dead of a gunshot wound to the head.

Note to babysitters: if you leave the kids alone while you go to the store, that kind of goes against the meaning of the term “babysitting”.

On Saturday, Trevaris Brown, 18, was watching a group of children at a home on Northwest 1st Court in Miami. Police said Brown left the children alone to go to the store.

That’s when, according to investigators, a 2-year-old boy got hold of a gun and fired it, striking 8-year-old Omoni Josey in the leg.

On one hand you have researchers that say that running a fan in your baby’s room may reduce SIDS. On the other, some South Koreans believe having a fan on while you are sleeping will cause your untimely demise. Hmmm, who to believe…

Using a fan in a baby’s room while the infant is sleeping is the latest recommendation from research on sudden infant death syndrome. Earlier findings have helped reduce the incidence of SIDS by 56 percent.

“It’s very different now than when she was raising me,” said Gonzales, who lives in Fremont with her husband and 5-month-old son. Her mother cares for Victor Lee while Gonzales is at work.

Findings of the Kaiser Permanente study released Monday suggest that using a fan while a baby is sleeping can reduce SIDS risk by 72 percent, although the fan is to be used in conjunction with recommendations from earlier studies, such as having babies sleep on their backs.

Conducted by the Division of Research of Kaiser Permanente Northern California, the study included 497 infants in 11 counties, including Santa Clara, Alameda, San Mateo and Monterey. There were 185 SIDS death cases in the study.

So much for that cage full of African Gambian rat we wanted to get for the kids to play with. They’re like real life Pokemon!

That iguana in your son’s bedroom isn’t just a reptile. It’s also a deadly-germ machine.

So says the American Academy of Pediatrics, which warns parents that many of the “easy” pets—the ones that don’t shed, don’t need to be walked, and don’t throw up on the sofa—pose serious health threats to young children. Sigh. And here I was so ready to convince my daughter that lizards are almost as cuddly as a Beverly Hills Chihuahua.

I’m not alone. In the past few years, more and more families have turned to nontraditional pets, largely because they’re considered easier to care for than cats and dogs. But they bring with them substantial health risks, particularly for children younger than 5.

A Kentucky woman who stabbed her two daughters to death before shooting herself in the head was affected by suicide herself when her husband killed himself three years earlier.

The killings confused many in the neighborhood who saw her with the girls every day. A counselor at the girls’ school, Wendy Anderson, described Hope Orwick as a volunteer and “just the mom you want supporting the school,” and Emily as “the type of student you want 24 of.”

She said the school staff saw Hope Orwick on Thursday, the last day of classes before the family was found dead.

“There were no signs. There was nothing that even looked odd,” she said. “Any single mom keeping children on their own can be a handful.”

A Los Angeles man incredibly upset about not being able to find a job turned that frustration into rage, killing his wife and three children before committing suicide. What an incredibly selfish act.

The shootings were discovered after 8:20 a.m. Monday, after a neighbor called police to report that the wife had failed to pick her up to take her to her job at a pharmacy, Deputy Chief of Police Michel Moore said.

Ed Winter, assistant chief from the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office, identified the suspect as Karthik Rajaram, 45.

Winter said the victims included Rajaram’s mother-in-law, Indra Ramasesham, 69, and his 19-year-old son Krishna Rajaram, a Fulbright Scholar and honor student at UCLA.

Also dead were Rajaram’s wife, 39, Subasari Rajaram, and their two other sons, 12 and 7. Some of the victims had been shot more than once, and their identities were not immediately confirmed, he said.

A woman in Elgin, Illinois may be in hot water after police investigate whether she used nude photos of her daughter’s 13-year-old ex-boyfriend to blackmail him into dating the girl again. That is just so many levels of screwed up.

“It’s a sad and surprising situation,” Sleepy Hollow Police Chief Jim Montalbano said. “We expect charges will be filed, hopefully by next week.”

The probe began Aug. 21 when a couple from Sleepy Hollow reported to police that their son received hundreds of threatening e-mails and text messages after the boy and his 13-year-old girlfriend of five months broke up, according to an officer’s sworn affidavit.

The parents told police their son admitted he and the girl had taken naked photos of themselves while dating, sharing them with each other with their cell phones, but the pictures of the girl no longer exist.

The parents said that after the breakup the girl’s mother told the boy she’d tell his parents about the images of him and post them online unless the youngsters started seeing each other again.