A very frightening article.

Since the start of this year, 219 people have contracted pertussis, and two have died. Both deaths were infants, under 3 months old. One in L.A. county and the other in Fresno county. It’s an alarming number, health leaders say, because at this time last year, there were only 118 cases statewide.

I picked up a brochure the last time we went to the pediatrician. It was all about how adults should get the pertussis vaccination again. Adults are actually susceptible to whooping cough, since our vaccinations have worn off. Unfortunately, with the drop in vaccination rates among children, this means that kids are more vulnerable to being infected by adults. While adults very rarely die of pertussis, it might be fatal to infants who come into contact with adult carriers.

After reading this frightening article, I will not be putting off that vaccination for myself.

BoingBoing posted this amazing video from the 1950s where a Texas mother is practicing her knife-throwing act with her children.

What really made me laugh was the comment by the author, Mark Frauenfelder:

“Take that, helicopter parents.”

I’m not sure if the kids look scared, bored, or excited. But, don’t you wish you lived next store to this woman so you could at least use her hobby as a threat against your kids? “If you don’t start behaving, I’m going to send you next door for target practice!” I think that would scare at least a few kids straight.

Esther has Mainstream Parenting Resources back online in a new format. Thank heavens she’s back. I kept checking the old website but missed her reappearance in March.

When I was telling a friend without kids about my weaning experience, she said, “Wow, this is nuts. I just heard that you had to teach a kid to nurse, and now I find out you have to teach them to stop! I thought it was all natural!”

Esther writes about the fact that humans have to learn to nurse in this post. She is referencing an journal article entitled Human Breastfeeding Is Not Automatic: Why That’s So and What It Means for Human Evolution. Author Anthony Volk starts off by asking the obvious question:
» Continue reading “Yay! Esther is Back!”

I finally weaned the boy. This is just a short, personal sort of post. I actually am writing on deadlines for a few projects at the moment. But I thought it would be interesting to get this up and see if it generates any response, because I had a hard time finding good advice about how to wean toddlers.

This may be a result of not searching hard enough, but it seemed like every article I found online basically tried to talk me out of weaning until the boy did it himself. And there were many online lectures about all those breastfeeding benefits I was about to cut off.

So if it is useful to anyone, here is how it went down in my house.
» Continue reading “Weaned!”

A recent article entitled: The Burden of Suboptimal Breastfeeding: A Pediatric Cost Analysis concludes the following:

If 90% of US families could comply with medical recommendations to breastfeed exclusively for 6 months, the United States would save $13 billion per year and prevent an excess 911 deaths, nearly all of which would be in infants ($10.5 billion and 741 deaths at 80% compliance).

I admit I haven’t read the full paper, just the abstract. Since my graduate school library proxy privileges have expired, it’s not so easy to get full texts of studies anymore. I learned of the study from Harriet Hall’s post at Science Based Medicine. She is skeptical of the study, so full disclosure, I am learning of this particular study from a source that already has pointed out its flaws. She draws attention to this questionable aspect of the paper:
» Continue reading “A New Study on Breastfeeding”

This is the time of year when colleges notify high school seniors of whether they were accepted, denied, or wait listed. It can be stressful for teenagers (and parents), so the Wall Street Journal has written a piece that should help keep it all in perspective. The article talks about some business, media, scientific, and financial powerhouses who were all rejected from their their first-choice schools. (Dear University of Michigan, I’m still bitter!)

It might be hard to get your senior to look on the bright side if they aren’t getting good news in the mail. But, this might help. Here is some sage advice from Columbia University President Lee Bollinger:

Don’t let rejections control your life. To “allow other people’s assessment of you to determine your own self-assessment is a very big mistake,” says Mr. Bollinger, a First Amendment author and scholar. “The question really is, who at the end of the day is going to make the determination about what your talents are, and what your interests are? That has to be you.”

And, Ted Turner really helps keep it all in perspective:

“A rejection letter doesn’t even come close to losing loved ones in your family. That is the hard stuff to survive,” Mr. Turner says. “I want to be sure to make this point: I did everything I did without a college degree,” he says. While it is better to have one, “you can be successful without it.”

Thanks to Lenore at Free Range Kids for the link!

Photo

We are having a secular Easter and pretty much ignored Passover. We “hid” eggs for my nearly two-year-old son, meaning we just scattered them around the living room in obvious places. We didn’t anticipate that the cat would think this was the best thing ever. Smells like food, rolls like a ball! Eggs everywhere. Oh well.

Growing up, my family did the eggs and baskets and never once went to church. However, we sometimes did a Passover seder. I remember loving it, and then as an adult, I decided the whole story was pretty wacky. I mean, God kills thousands of people in that tale. It seems like if he could appear as a pillar of fire and part the Red Sea, well, he might have been able to get the Jews out of Egypt with a little less bloodshed. The whole process was wildly inefficient.
» Continue reading “Easter, Passover, and Charlton Heston”

I was happy to see Steven Novella addressed the topic of acupuncture and IVF on his Neurologica blog.  Anyone who has dealt with infertility knows that acupuncture is often touted as beneficial.  I went through this myself and wrote about it here.  In my case, the diagnosis turned out to be incorrect, and I conceived naturally.  My experiments with alternative treatments tipped the balance toward my becoming a skeptic.
» Continue reading “Acupuncture and IVF”