Infant Deaths Cause Recall of Blinds & Shades

During a time when many of our families are outfitting their nurseries and hanging new blinds or shades, everyone needs to be aware of the dangers of dangling cords. Six companies have issued recalls after three children have died by becoming tangled in cords. The three deaths occurred in 2006 and it has taken the Consumer Product Safety Commission this long to notify the public. It makes me wonder if the death of a one year old killed in 2007 could have been prevented.

I am sad to say that I know someone who lost a child to this very problem over 20 years ago. It's not something you can ever get over, especially when it's preventable. Make sure that your child's crib is not next to the window. This makes sense not only because of the cord, but also because of the window, which could be broken.

Recalled blinds are;
Pottery Barn Kids/Williams Sonoma, Inc. - 85,000 roman shades with exposed inner cords (four kids were found entangled with cords around their necks)

IKEA Home Furnishings - 120,000 Melina Roman blinds (2-year-old found hanging from the looped bead chain).

Vertical Land - 32,000 blinds and shades (death of a 4-year-old girl strangled in the loop of a vertical blind cord not attached to wall or floor).

Lewis Hyman, Inc. - 4.2 million roll up blinds (1-year-old strangled and killed in the lift cord of the roll up blind; a 13-month-old died after his head was caught between exposed cords and cloth on the back side of the shade).

Target - 163,000 Thermal Sailcloth and Matchstick Bamboo roman shades imported by Victoria Classics, sold in 2008 & 2009. They have exposed inner cords.

Lutron Electronics Co. distributed 245,000 roller shades that were sold at specialty dealers and Expo Design Centers from 2000 to April, 2009. There is a looped bead chain that should be attached to floor or wall.

If you own any of these blinds, you should contact the manufacturer for repair or money back. I would suggest taking them down, since no expense is worth the loss of a child. You can download information at the CPSC website and post it at your local day care or school. If you have additional questions or want to research the products and repair options, please go to the Consumer Product Safety Commission website at;

http://www.cpsc.gov

Weekend Warrior

Weekends are never quiet around here. I decided to work the weekend, as I often do, because I was gone part of last week getting my daughter settled in her dorm (in 109 degree heat, yuck!), and wanted to play catch up on things that needed to be done at the office. My web goddess (as I call her) came by to work on the website and help me with a few internet related things. It felt like a regular day at work because the phones kept ringing. Sarita, a birth mother, called to make an adoption plan and spent the better part of an hour and a half on the phone with me. Gina, our web designer, asked me "Do they all take that long?" Pretty much. When talking with a birth mom, I want to give her enough time to feel comfortable with me and get to the point of being able to open up and share information. If she feels comfortable and secure, she won't make any other calls. By the time we got off the phone, Sarita felt much better and we agreed she would look at some profiles.

The phone kept ringing...and it was good news. IT'S A GIRL! We want to welcome baby Amaia Alese, who was born on Saturday, Aug. 22, and weighed in at 7 lbs. 6 oz. Congratulations to Geri and R.J. on the birth of their new daughter! Hopefully, they will be back home in Pennsylvania by this coming weekend.

So, if you've had a little trouble reaching me over the past few days, I've been pretty busy with phones and important baby business. I'm here and I'll catch up...some day.

Empty Nests

When my first two children were 8 and 5, I was presumably content with having my boy and girl and was excited when my youngest, Erin, started kindergarten. It didn't take long before "empty nest" syndrome set in and I needed another baby in the house. It was a long, difficult journey with miscarriages, a fetal demise, an acute allergic bronchospasm requiring hospitalization, a placental abruption, surgery for a cerclage, and 18 weeks of bed rest before I achieved my goal, and my son, Dylan was born. Never mind that he was born with pneumonia and ended up being transferred to a hospital in San Diego. At that point, I was 37 and it was the end of my childbearing days. But, I went out on a win, so I was happy.

Now, 20 years later, my daughter is heading off to school again, and the house is going to feel terribly empty. Erin will leave tomorrow for the dorm at UNLV, home of the Rebels. For those who know her, there is no more appropriate mascot. I will miss my risk-taking, fun-loving daughter. She has a strong will and a competitive spirit (much like my own?), and I think she's going to do great things. She'll be studying kinesiology/sports medicine. Who wouldn't want to massage athletes? Just kidding! She is going into physical therapy and she'll be good at it, as she has the spirit of an athlete and it will be important to her to get her patients back out on the field. She's threatening to take up skydiving and that has Mom more than a little nervous, but I guess she wouldn't be Erin if she didn't try crazy things. Good luck, my little Rebel. Your brother and I will miss you.

...And Other Safety Issues

On Sunday, we attended a minor league baseball game at Storm Stadium (Padres) in which Dr. Sean Bush was honored for his work with snakebite victims. It was great...he threw out the first pitch. His wife, mentioned that he didn't want to "throw like a girl". Well, he'd be lucky to throw like some of the girls on the local high school softball team! He did a fine job, though, and hopefully opened some eyes to the dangers of snakebites. We're still looking for donations for Zamo's additional physical therapy and possibly one more surgery. She looked wonderful, though. Zamo was charismatic and very friendly, coming up to me and holding both of my hands. What a doll. I was happy to see such remarkable progress with her wounds.

On the way home, my son and I encountered an accident site. The road was closed off, so we had to go around it. Driving by, we noticed only one small truck, which was badly damaged on the front right fender. I was concerned that perhaps it had collided with a motorcycle. There were people standing around crying which was disheartening, but we didn't know what had happened. We learned yesterday that it was actually a vehicle vs. bicycle accident. The fender was so badly damaged, it was apparent that some amount of speed was involved. A 15-year-old boy, the same age as my son, was struck. He was not wearing a helmet and it cost him his life. I don't know if the vehicle driver was at fault, but regardless of that, had this young man been wearing a helmet, he may have survived being thrown onto the asphalt, where he struck his head. It is such a tragedy and perhaps one that could be avoided. His family is devastated and there is no going back.

Also last weekend, a young man in Huntington Beach, California was enjoying a party with friends. They were kids from a Christian school and there was no alcohol involved -- they were just fooling around. One of his friends jumped into his car and started it and began to drive off. He made a bad decision to jump onto the top of the car. The friend kept going and said he was "just playing". When he rounded a corner, not going very fast, the young high school student fell off the roof of his own car. He was killed by trauma to his head, which was no match for the pavement.

We need to educate our children about helmet safety. While helmets may inhibit some movement, they are essential to saving lives. They may be inconvenient, but that inconvenience is worth the trade off. A funeral is inconvenient too.

School Bus Safety

When I was growing up, most cars didn't have seat belts. I can remember driving down the street in our tank -- uh, car -- a '64 Chevy Impala, with my parents. No one had seat belts in those days. It's almost a little surreal to think about that today. Now, there are penalties for not having everyone in your car belted in. If an accident occurs and a child dies as a result of not being belted in, charges can be filed against the person responsible. As a mom, I was obsessive about infant car seats being belted in and painstakingly reading the instructions (and you know I hate reading instructions!)on how to install toddler seats. My children developed the habit of putting on seat belts as soon as they got into a vehicle. Most parents today are obsessive about making sure their children are safe in the car. So, we spend a lifetime doing that daily ritual, but when our kids get onto a school bus, there are no seat belts. Why are we okay with that? Is the cost factor worth the lives of children?

In our school district, as in many, parents are required to pay a transportation fee for their children to ride the bus to school. Between this fee and taxes, it would seem that seat belts should be in the budget. Perhaps some of Mr. Obama's health care bill costs could be cut if we had fewer injuries of children in school bus crashes.

After many fatal bus accidents,some people have begun to take notice. A research grant was awarded to the University Transportation Center for Alabama. I find this ironic. $300,000.00 was provided for a three-year pilot program. I'm not sure why we need a pilot program and dedicated research to tell us that children loose in a bus are not safe. We've all read the news reports of kids on buses getting up and causing problems, bullies, and other reasons school bus drivers have been distracted. Doesn't it make sense to provide safety belts for all children on buses for their safety and the safety of others? Wouldn't this allow the driver to pay more attention to the road and the actual driving of the bus, rather than having his or her eyes on the rearview mirror all the time the bus is moving? It makes perfect sense to me that rule number one on every school bus should be to buckle in. If a child is caught out of the seat belt, the bus doesn't move until they are back in. It wouldn't take long to train a bus full of children to stay in their seatbelts. Peer pressure is great in this respect. If a child is warned a few times, then they are no longer allowed to ride the bus for a period of time and a parent must find some other way to get them transported to school. This would keep everyone safer, and there wouldn't be kids getting up in a moving bus. There would be far less problems with bullying or injuries caused by quick stops or fender benders on the buses and our children would have a fighting chance if a bus were to have a rollover accident.

This seems like a no-brainer to me, but the experts have to do a study and report back a few years from now. They want to make sure their data is accurate. While they "get it right", I wonder if that time table will affect the lives (or shorten them) of some children around the country before seat belts become the norm. Why not cut to the chase and enact laws now that bus drivers must follow, just as parents do in cars every day? Is it fair to hold parents to a higher standard than a school bus driver? Is it reasonable or ethical to counter the due diligence of parents in their everyday routine with haphazard and downright dangerous conditions on the buses that transport their children to school each day? In my opinion, we should demand seat belts on our school buses and not take no for an answer. What is more important than the safety of our children? We can cut financial corners some other place. School buses should not even be manufactured without safety harnesses/seat belts.

For those of you with babies or small children, this is going to become a very important issue for you before you know it. Make your communities and local school districts aware of it now and your children will be safe later. It's hard enough to let them go off to school alone with they are little. They need to get there and get home safely.

ICWA and Tribal Gaming

ICWA is the Indian Child Welfare Act. It allows sovereign tribes to decide the fate of infants with Indian blood who are being placed for adoption. I believe the original intent of the law was to allow Native American tribes to retain their culture and keep their tribes from being disbanded. Interestingly, much has changed over the years since ICWA was enacted. Tribes are no longer poor due to tribal gaming. This has had an impact on Native American children in a number of ways. A Native American birth mother or a woman who is having a child by a Native American father can be forced to place her child within the tribe or parent even if she is not prepared to do so. I think that this is a violation of her rights as a mother. She can choose to abort the baby, but she has no say where it goes if she gives it life. I do understand the tribal perspective in terms of culture and maintenance of tribal customs, but with each generation we all become more mixed and intertwined with other races. How pure of race is anyone? I can trace my own roots back to a Palous Indian chief, but I don't have tribal benefits.

Just this week, a tribe intervened and didn't allow an adoption that was planned by the birth mother. They decided that they wanted to keep the child within the tribe. She felt forced to do what the tribe dictated, rather than take the baby home -- something that she wasn't prepared to do. She was asking for support because she couldn't feed the kids she had. I wonder where the tribe was when she was pregnant. While I respect the right of a tribe to maintain their heritage, I don't feel it's fair to a birth mother to make the decisions for her. Not that life is fair, but each tribe treats it differently, which means women in the same situation are treated differently depending upon the tribe. I've only had two or three situations in my career where a tribe actually intervened.

I do find it interesting that tribal gaming has changed the way ICWA is administered and there is no consistency across the tribal lines. Some wealthy tribes don't get involved but, rather, allow the birth mother to make her own adoption plan. Why? Because another tribal member means another way to split the pie -- the income that is generated with tribal gaming. It means less for them, so they throw out the concept of retaining tribal members within the tribe. The importance of tribal culture that they fought so hard to retain is simply discarded in favor of the almighty dollar.

In California, a well-known tribe excommunicated over a dozen members who could trace their roots and had been in the tribe their entire lives. This tribe went back several generations to question whether an ancestor was entitled to membership back then. Because they are a sovereign nation, they could decide who was a member and who wasn't. They chose to disenfranchise and de-legitimize people who had been tribal members since birth. These Native Americans were good enough to be considered tribal members until there was money from tribal gaming to be split.

Tribal traditions, culture, and heritage are being polluted by power and money. Doesn't everyone deserve the same opportunity to decide what's best for their child? I think we're dealing with human rights here as much as we are sovereign nations. Does the tribe trump basic human rights? I've had Native American women tell me that they absolutely don't want their child to be raised on the reservation, as alcoholism is so prevalent. Yet, if a woman belongs to a certain tribe, they will decide for her where the baby goes. Shouldn't that be her call? There is only a baby because SHE chose to carry it. Could this possibly contribute to a woman's decision to have an abortion? I believe so. I wonder how many Native American babies lost their lives because of this very issue. I think ICWA was enacted for good reason, but circumstances aren't the same in current times. I think that today ICWA is no longer viable and the issue of Native American Indians and adoption should be revisited. It's time to give every woman the right to choose a home for her child. We certainly give women choices that carry much more dire consequences for both mother and child.

UPDATES

Please say a prayer for Katie's son Dakota who sustained an injury while riding his bike and is currently in surgery at Children's in Pittsburgh. We found out today that the new baby due in a few months is a girl, so Dakota will have a new little sister before long. Get well soon, Dakota.

Welcome baby Anjelessa Jo, born this morning in Minnesota. Happy Birthday! Congratulations to Sherry and Bob, who are currently bonding blissfully with their newborn daughter. Birth mom is doing well and is happy with her choice.

Zamo, the baby who was bitten by a snake, will have to be treated for another three months and will have one more surgery before she can go home. There was a little setback with scar contractures, but she's a trooper and will eventually be ready to go home to Swaziland. Dr. Sean Bush (Venom E.R.), who has been treating her, has arranged for her to stay with a family in Southern California, but they are still in need of donations to defray the costs of the additional physical therapy and the extra three month stay. If you wish to donate, Loma Linda University Medical Center will accept donations on their behalf and it is tax-deductible.

We are currently looking for a family for 10 and 11 year old siblings. They are a Caucasian boy and girl, who have been living with grandparents for most of their lives. The grandparents are in poor health and fear that they won't be around to raise the kids and are looking for a good home for them. This is a difficult situation, as children this age are very aware of everything and won't necessarily adapt to having new "parents". They are healthy and don't have any apparent issues, but it will take a lot of love and patience for these kids to be absorbed into a family. If you know anyone who is the right candidate to adopt these children, please put them in touch.

Please remember that with our current economy and housing situation, people are abandoning pets in record numbers. If you want a new dog or cat, please be sure to go to the local animal shelter and also to support them if you can. Some shelters have needs that are easy to fill (newspapers are a welcome donation for most shelters). Donations of dry pet food are also welcome. It may mean that they can keep pets alive longer to allow for adoption. Pets need adoption too!

For a wonderful way to announce a birth or give a special personalized gift for any occasion (like the best carmel apples you'll ever eat!), nannyssugarcookies.com. is the place. Look under baby shower and you'll see all kinds of baby ideas and birth announcement options. Nannette will also do something custom for you by request. It's a yummy way to say thanks or congratulations.