If you read this newspaper's Business section yesterday -- and who wouldn't, since it's so much fun viewing current stock prices -- you know about the Salary.com study suggesting that stay-at-home moms deserve to be paid $116,805 annually.

Their impressive theoretical take-home pay is driven by all of the overtime they'd be entitled to: more than 50 hours a week. Sounds reasonable to us, especially since women only average about three-fourths as much income as men. If we can just get someone to pay us as a stay-at-home dad, a sweet $155,740 a year should be coming into the bank account.

That kind of thinking probably isn't what surveyors had in mind with the study. They were more likely thinking of women's interests than men's, considering the Mother's Day holiday. But don't tell that to the dudes at www.askmen.com, whose message-board hackles were raised by the dollar amount put on mom's worth.

One presumably wife-free man estimated that, in reality, he could get a good maid service for $10,000 a year, some decent live-in child care for $20,000 and a woman with whom he could enjoy twice-weekly sex (jeez, what is he, Superman?) for $30,000.

"So yea I couldn't value a stay-at-home mom for more than 60K ... if even," he wrote in that eloquent, rational, fair-minded style that men frequently use.

Another chap chimed in: "You are only worth 117K if you can go out and get someone to hire you for that, in a month or reasonable time."

Piggish or reasonable statements above to the contrary, we did stumble across one mother possibly worth every cent she gets, whatever it is.

The Duggar family of Little Rock, Ark., has been profiled on the Discovery Health channel. The reason? They have 17 children, and now Michelle Duggar, 41, is due with an 18th. Arrival is expected on New Year's Day.

The kids range in age from 9 months to 20, with two sets of twins thrown in. All of the kids' first names start with J, and they must be starting to run out, because they've resorted to Jinger and Jedidiah for two of them. Those two would get made fun of a lot at school, if not for the fact that the whole Duggar colony is home-schooled.

The Duggars speak of God's role in making all this happen. They don't explain how God settles disputes over use of the bathroom or middle seats in cars or who drank the last can of pop. That's why Mama Duggar deserves the big bucks.

We'd also be willing to pay the $117,000 to Frieda Birnbaum, from a New York City suburb, who last year gave birth at age 60 to twin boys. She had undergone in-vitro fertilization at a South African clinic specializing in older women.

Ms. Birnbaum, a psychologist, already had three children with her husband. That wasn't quite enough, however, and she shrugged off concerns raised at the time about how well she would take care of the twins when she's in her 70s.

She said people "need to get ready for what's coming up in our society. ... I hope I'm a role model for my daughter [then 29], that when she gets older that she can make her own decisions based on who she is rather than what society dictates."

That's all fine, conceptually, but little Josh and Jaret seem doomed to an existence down the road where they'll learn to drive from people traveling 25 mph in a 40 mph zone. Something's seriously wrong there.

Something about moms and sons and cars just doesn't mix. An Iowa mother nominated herself as "meanest mom on the planet" in a classified advertisement after she took a car away from her 19-year-old son in January. Jane Hambleton had found alcohol in the car, violating one of the rules laid down on son Steven.

Mrs. Hambleton's newspaper ad read in part: "OLDS 1999 Intrigue. Totally uncool parents who obviously don't love teenage son, selling his car. Only driven for three weeks before snoopy mom who needs to get a life found booze under front seat. $3,700 offer."

As it turns out, the car sold after plenty of offers came in, and mother was hailed as a parenting hero when appearing on national news and talk shows. School counselors, emergency room workers and plenty of others applauded Mrs. Hambleton's firmness.

Despite Steven's insistence that the alcohol didn't belong to him, his one tough mother said, "It's overwhelming the number of calls I've gotten from people saying, 'Thank you, it's nice to see a responsible parent.' So far there are no calls from anyone saying, 'You're really strict. You're real overboard, lady.' "

Mrs. Hambleton sounds like the kind of mother who might be worth paying $117,000. Steven, on the other hand, might disagree.