Latest Additions

No injuries from this one, but if you purchased a toy chest from Pottery Barn, watch out for the lid, says the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC).  Apparently, it may not stay open, and it could come crashing down on your or your child.  The affected model numbers include 4825378 (Honey), 6252852 (Espresso) and 4825386 (White), and you can find the model number on a label attached to the back of the toy chest.  Kudos to Pottery Barn for notifying consumers before a child was injured.  They will provide consumers with a kit to keep the lid open.

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If you have egg and soy allergies in your family, you’ll want to know about these recalls from the Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Network. 

-Amay Brand Almond Cookies from Summit Import Corp.  for egg, sold in Brooklyn, NY.
-Catherine’s Finest Pecan Caramel Clusters and Shwom’s Caramel Pecan Clusters from Barricini Candy for soy.  These products were distributed primarily in California, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Texas, and Washington through fundraising organizations. 

We post these so that in the midst of all the opinions and gadgets, families who need this information will have it.  Our nightly struggle is simply what to eat for dinner. so our hats are off to those who manage their children’s food intake due to allergies. 

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The University of Utah has released results of a study on divorce trends, and the marriages of children from divorced homes.  The reseacher has concluded that these children are likely doomed to repeat history because they tend to marry younger and they have learned different lessons about marital commitment than their peers from non-divorced families.  This sounds pretty plausible until I ask a few questions like....HUH?  We have experts telling us that our kids’ friends at school have as much or more impact on them than their parents.  Which is it?  How do we know if the subjects of this study had good parenting in a divorced household and just got mixed up with the wrong crowd?  Also, this Utah report claims that divorce is more traumatic on a child THAN A PARENT DYING?!?  Don’t even get me started on that one.  I don’t know how you measure trauma in a research setting, but I would think a child would rather have both parents alive in separate households than lose one completely.  This article also mentions that lots of transitions are hard on kids, so then we should be factoring in other factors such as how much the family relocated in these statistics I would think.

Just a few questions that came to mind.  Not to say there is isn’t any measure of validity to the findings, but I think before we pin all future divorces on currently divorced parents we need to dig a little deeper.

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For those do-it-yourselfers out there, the internet has made it possible to do just about any type of business function without leaving the house these days.  If you have a nanny and would like to remain friends with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), then this is the site for you.  You can handle the business of having a nanny without finding a shirt that doesn’t have encrusted food on it to visit your accountant.  There is a fee for the service, of course, but those tax penalties can be pretty steep. 

In checking this out, I realized that being a nanny is big business.  They have a professional association with a board, and they are a pretty educated group overall.  This is good for us as parents, because even though it drives the cost up, we have some reassurances that these are professionals caring for our kids.  Or, you can just do what we do and suck the life out of your extended family.  Whatever works.  Just be sure you pay the employment taxes.

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Here we are reviewing mounds of evidence regarding vaccinations and their potential link to autism.  No one can give us a straight answer, but leave it to our medical researchers to complicate things even more.  Now, there is a 5-in-1 vaccine that is supposedly safe and effective.  Researchers in Italy have come up with this wonderful invention, and they say it has mild side effects.  It is understandable that they may have a problem with a certain percentage of children not receiving all of the shots according to the recommended schedule, but is Hib a really big problem in Italy?  Couldn’t the good folks at the University of Ferrera try to address cancer, AIDS, premature labor, or another larger issue?  And, is the entire world going to be forced to use the 5-in-1, or can we still separate the shots if we want to - unlike the current situation with the MMR, where a parent cannot find an independent measles shot to make sure it doesn’t contain a mixing agent or preservative that will turn our children purple? 

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The Associated Press brings us a new article further highlighting the suspected link between thimerosal in vaccines and autism.  While it is unclear whether officials blatantly covered up research or simply experienced a lapse in judgement, the fact is that it looks like a link could be there and someone was not acting on the possibility.  According to the president of the National Vaccine Information Center, “...a subset of kids can’t handle mercury because of a genetic or other kind of predisposition...,” and oddly enough, this is exactly what our own physician told us when we asked about this issue.  When comparing the idea of mercury sensitivity to food allergies and other genetic conditions, it seems entirely plausible that some children would not handle mercury well, so why a medical professional didn’t catch this is beyond me. 

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The Education Trust shares some surprising and scary findings about high school graduation rates in the United States.  Apparently, some states are playing funny money with their numbers to inflate percentages, and it works, until someone pulls the covers back on the statistics.  One state reports the percentage of high school seniors who graduate, completely ignoring the freshmen, sophomores and juniors who drop out.  As parents, we can focus on our own children to make sure they attend school, but we have to wonder about the quality of the education if states are being so sneaky with their reporting.

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The Consumer Product Safety Commission and Prestige Toy Corporation announce the recall of Spinning Water Teethers, because the plastic spinner can break, causing beads to fall out.  The product was sold at Carter’s stores nationwide from March 2005 to April 2005.

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I must admit, I was a little surprised to see this one on Yahoo!.  A doctor in Detroit who previously conducted animal research at UCLA has started using a scanning device on human infants that was designed for small animals.  The technology is called micro positron emissions tomography (PET), and the claim is that the device can help detect brain disease in infants.  This may be a great advance in medicine, but I hope we are not going to find out 10 years later that this gizmo shoots out too many emissions for an infant brain to handle.  After all, here is how the idea was generated, in a quote from the physician:  “I said to myself, ‘A monkey is about the same size as a newborn, why don’t I stick one of these machines in the nursery?’”

Like I said, this may be the next great thing in medicine, and I’m sure a lot of disease will be detected early, and possibly dealt with in more appropriate ways, but as a parent, I’d have a whole lot of questions.  Read on if you do too.

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You may have heard about the proposed cuts for public broadcasting, including NPR and PBS, which could threaten commercial-free shows like “Sesame Street” “Clifford the Big Red Dog,” and “Arthur.” Read on to learn more about the issues and how you can help. 

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