My brother-in-law maintains that every child needs to eat a handful of dirt now and again to boost his or her immune system. There was a great article in the New York Times this week agreeing with this theory.

Babies Know: A Little Dirt is Good for You

A quick excerpt:

One leading researcher, Dr. Joel V. Weinstock, the director of gastroenterology and hepatology at Tufts Medical Center in Boston, said in an interview that the immune system at birth “is like an unprogrammed computer. It needs instruction.”


He said that public health measures like cleaning up contaminated water and food have saved the lives of countless children, but they “also eliminated exposure to many organisms that are probably good for us.”


“Children raised in an ultraclean environment,” he added, “are not being exposed to organisms that help them develop appropriate immune regulatory circuits.”

So, don’t obsess and over sanitize for your kids. Their bodies need to be exposed to bacteria and germs now and again. And, maybe even the occasional mud pie.

So now that the boy sleeps and takes naps, and especially today, when I’m home with him because he had a fever and a cough this morning, I really try to catch up on blogging. And this means that I end up just reading and reading other people’s blogs, rather than actually working on my own posts. I’ve been trolling through our blog roll, and then through the rolls of other blogs, finding all kinds of great stuff.

This is an article which helped me to understand why it’s difficult to do a study on vaccinated versus unvaccinated children. » Continue reading “Prepare Your Responses to Your Anti Vaccine Pals”

Don’t call them. They’ll call you. You can’t volunteer but if you’re having a baby soon, they might get in touch.

WASHINGTON – Scientists begin recruiting mothers-to-be in North Carolina and New York this week for the largest study of U.S. children — aiming eventually to track 100,000 around the country from conception to age 21.
“We are embarking on the road to discovering the preventable causes of the major chronic diseases that plague American children today,” Dr. Philip Landrigan of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, one of the lead researchers, declared Tuesday.

(The Humanist Association Ad, via pharyngula and friendly atheist.)

On a personal note, when reading both The Audacity of Hope and Obama’s earlier memoir Dreams from My Father, it meant a lot to me to read such an inspiring portrait of this amazing woman: Barack Obama’s mother. It seems you don’t hear much praise for humanist moms, but we’re out there.

We just did some sleep training with our son, and I became a believer in what’s known as the “Cry It Out” (CIO) method. Really, crying is not the object but an unfortunate side effect of babies learning to soothe themselves to sleep. My entire saga of this adventure is up on our family blog. It’s a somewhat long winded post, as I was recovering from a night of very little sleep and was rambling a bit. The next night, Zack went to sleep in mere seconds and stayed asleep. We were amazed. » Continue reading “Thoughts on Sleep”

The latest two kids’ films we’ve seen at our house are Wall-E and Curious George. Wide-distribution children’s films generally can’t have a message that’s too edgy (as I mentioned in my post about morals for children in “Cars” and “Happy Feet”), so they can give us an idea of what sorts of ideas are squarely in the mainstream.

In that light, Wall-E’s premise — that future humans had rendered the surface of the Earth unfit for human habitation — kind of surprised me. Maybe I’ve been reading too many conservative blogs, but I thought there were still enough climate-change deniers to out there to make this sort of thing a touchy subject. Perhaps not. » Continue reading “What’s mainstream now? Notes on Wall-E and Curious George”

My son seven month old son finally has hair, and it’s red. Since my hair is light brown, and my husband’s is almost black, all we hear from admiring strangers is, “Who’s got the red hair?”

It turns out both my husband and I must have red hair in our family in order to produce our lovely red haired offspring. » Continue reading “Who’s Got the Red Hair”

Thanks to Jodi, who pointed out this article about Dr. Offit, author of Autism’s False Prophets in the New York Times (in the comments on my post below).

One great quote:

Many doctors now argue that reporters should treat the antivaccine lobby with the same indifference they do Holocaust deniers, AIDS deniers and those claiming to have proof that NASA faked the Moon landings.

It’s a good read.

We’ve gotten letters! It’s been a rough couple of months over here at this rational mom’s house, but things are going a little more smoothly now that we’ve sleep trained the babe. I actually have evenings to myself now–it’s a stunning expanse of time. So I’m getting around to posts I’ve been wanting to do for a while.

First, wow, check it out. An email from someone who like, thinks we know what we’re doing! » Continue reading “Dr. Sears Alternative Vaccine Schedule”

In the comments to “Never Break a Curly Bulb  Part 1 ” so many questions arose, that my response comment turned into a whole blog post!

For starters, catgirl asks “For comparison, how hazardous is a normal light bulb?”

Great question! I hadn’t really thought about it. I’d say the short answer is » Continue reading “Never Break a Curly Bulb Part 2″