Gaming for Good at Gen Con 2014!

Jim and I are hosting a panel discussion at Gen Con Indy 2014 on Friday, August 15th!

With other charitable gamers, we'll discuss "Gaming for Good: An Insider's Guide to Charity Gaming."

Turn your gaming hobby into a force for good. Veteran charity gaming event organizers share their secrets for joining, organizing, promoting & hosting successful fundraisers. Panelists will include Dan Patriss, organizer of Gamers for Cures, and Jamey Stegmaier, co-founder of Stonemaier Games, and Jim & Adrienne Jones, organizers of an Extra Life weekend for Riley Children's Hospital

There are only 9 tickets left (out of 50!), so be swift.

If you're going to Gen Con and just want to meet up (let me recommend Sunday lunch at Scotty's Brewhouse for wonderful family meal), send us an email.

As you know, we love "The Best Four Days in Gaming" as gamers and parents. Our kids love Gen Con too!

Thank you for all of your support of our ongoing Extra Life efforts! We're busy planning our Extra Life 2014 weekend for October 24-26 in Evansville, Indiana (save the date and join our team?).

***Baby Toolkit is the collected ramblings of some Gen Xers about their lives as parents, midwesterners, gamers, and geeks. Our opinions are our own (who would want them?), and you can get even more Jones goodness at our board game podcast Great Big Table.

Mountains Beyond Mountains: Medical Relief for Haiti

A few years ago, I read Mountains Beyond Mountains, Tracy Kidder's excellent biography of Dr. Paul Farmer. The book (like Farmer's life) reminds me of the immense power of a determined individual.

Dr. Farmer found his place and purpose in an impoverished place not so far from our own borders.

His organization, Partners In Health, has been serving rural Haiti since 1987. Now, although two hours from Port-au-Prince, earthquake victims are arriving for treatment. A local church is being used for additional treatment space.

Partners In Health is an American foundation born out of Haiti. This organization is one of the most knowledgeable and prepared to serve Haiti. Within hours of the quake they were already working to route critical supplies through the Dominican Republic. Their Stand with Haiti site offers news from their Haitian clinic.

Please consider helping them help others. Giving (according to psychological research) is one of the most gratifying ways to spend your money.

The Amazon links in this post benefit Partners in Health as will any additional Amazon shopping through these links.

***Baby Toolkit is the work of a some opinionated geek parents. Partners in Health is an AMAZING non-profit humanitarian organization created by a hard-working doctor with genius and compassion. These opinions are freely given and we have no undisclosed relationship with Partners in Health (beyond the sizable intrinsic benefits in giving). These are good people with insight; Help them change lives.

STOP sending Noah Biorkman cards: Spread the word!

Recently the Internet mobilized to make the last days of Noah Biorkman's life better by sending him Christmas cards.

People did (over 80k pieces of mail on one day alone), and they were greatly appreciated.

Noah is now in his last days, and his family has requested that people stop sending cards. Snopes.com reports that family requested no more cards or gifts:

Wow! The outpouring of love and concern for Noah is just
amazing! Scott and I never in a million years thought that so many
people would want to send Christmas cards to Noah. However, please
note: We did already celebrate Christmas LAST Sunday -- November
8th.

PLEASE STOP SENDING CARDS AND GIFTS!!!!

Noah is very ill. He is not getting out of bed and it's time for
Scott, our families, and I to concentrate on our son. His time is
very short and he needs us.

Please publicize this in your communities (real and virtual). A quick tweet or a facebook update would do a lot to keep a postal tidal wave from complicating this family's final days together.

Let's have second Internet miracle and put this Christmas card genie back in the bottle.

If you want to do more for Noah and other families facing the same horror, donate a dollar or more in his name to the Children's Hospital of Michigan Foundation.

The full snopes.com post: http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/medical/biorkman.asp
Noah Biorkman's Care Pages site: https://www.carepages.com/carepages/NoahScottBiorkman

Thermos update: An interview and a new generation

Our friends at Z Recommends scored an interview with Thermos' Rick Dias at the ABC Kids' Expo in Vegas. And what did they discuss? Plastic changes in response to consumer and (*ahem*) blogger complaints.

I'll keep you posted on any new developments in the ongoing FUNtainer saga.

*photo: Baby Toolkit, (c)2008

Our Secret Project: Meet Our New Intern

Since early summer, you might have noticed a declining number of posts. We've secretly been working on a huge project.

As Ranger grows strong and tall, we've been losing the baby inspiration for our ongoing toolkit posts.

So we decided to recruit a young intern to turn our attentions back to things baby in addition to ongoing toddler/preschool content.

Without further ado, I am pleased to introduce you to our new BabyJ:
As she gets a little older and asserts more personality, we'll discover her true blog nickname.

Ranger, Jim, and I are all really happy to meet her and welcome her to our family.

Putting Words to Paper: Check Out November's Parents Magazine

My cell phone very conspicuously rang yesterday at my physician's appointment. It was hanging in my bag right below a gigantic sign reading "Absolutely NO cell phones" while the dermatologist I've been seeing since childhood checked the same old moles and their new colleagues for signs of revolution and mutation.*

After leaving the office, I made a return call in the elevator. Jim said "I'm driving back to work, and I have a November issue of Parents with me." Well, faster than homeland security can search that statement for coded meaning, I am in the car driving toward the nearest bookstore.

Why the sudden acceleration to buy a magazine I already subscribe to? Because my article appears on page 152. It's "The OMG Guide to Parenting Disasters." Written months ago, I didn't know exactly when it might appear.

I resisted the urge to show the my driver's license and the byline to everyone in Borders (saving that kind of shamelessly excited bragging for, well, this post). Back in my car, I opened the magazine and took it all in. My body rang with electricity as I held the concrete reality of print publication.

Wow. Thank you, Judy (I owe you a cupcake) for inviting me to write and providing such great support and editing. You and Parents gave me an opportunity to fulfill one of those long-shot lifelong dreams.

*Important medical note: I made this skin check-up appointment the day after I drove my dear friend (36 years old) home from Moh's surgery to remove facial skin cancer. My friend's cancer (which she thought was a persistant pimple) taught me that skin cancer can strike any skin type at almost any age. Even though it's not always easy to get to the doctor, it is important to get regular check-ups.

Nipple Cream Recalled: Mommy's Bliss Off The Shelves

A friend sent me a notification of an FDA product recall on Mommy's Bliss Nipple Cream by MOM Enterprises.

Since it's an FDA recall rather than one by the CPSC, it has not shown up in the regular RSS feed of recalls (I recommend everyone who uses a feed reader subscribe to the CPSC recall feed).

Why was the nipple cream recalled? According to Janet Woodcock, director of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research:

[The] FDA is particularly concerned that nursing infants are being unwittingly exposed by their mothers to this product with dangerous side effects. Additionally, these two ingredients may interact with one another to further compound and increase the risk of respiratory depression in nursing infants.

I find the manufacturer's response to the recall a bit intriguing. Although it has many of the same characteristics of Tylenol's laudable response to the deadly Tylenol tampering of the 80s, I can't help but feel their self-defensiveness is premature as their ingredients are under scrutiny. It also seems apparent from their own web site that they're using natural ingredients in quantities that have not been tested with infants:

The FDA also neglected to mention that the amount of chlorphenesin and phenoxyethanol in the product is minute relative to what is considered allowable for adults.

Wow, I feel like I'm having flashbacks to my April conversation with Johnson & Johnson's Susan Nettesheim regarding the safety of products made by start-up companies and the fact that natural isn't synonymous with safe.

Shake It Up: Local Earthquake

At 4:36 am we awoke to a bit of thunderous outdoor rumbling and indoor shaking. It looks like nothing even fell off our shelves.

Ranger, upon our atypical appearance in his room, said "lights off, blanket on!" He wouldn't abide any nonsense from his slightly dazed, adrenaline-fueled parents. The shaking stopped (with the ground, though not my nervous system) as soon as we went to pick him up. He immediately went back to sleep as if crazed adults burst into his room every early morning.

Anyway, this is a great day to think about your local hazards (we have tornadoes and earthquakes here) and formulate a plan of how you'll react in case of emergency.

Please visit our earlier post on daily habits that contribute to emergency preparedness.

"Meanest Mom on the Planet" a.k.a. One Great Mother!

Yahoo News served up a tantalizing headline today: 'Mean Mom' sell's son's car after misdeed.

In short, self-proclaimed "meanest mom on the planet" Jane Hambleton SOLD her 19-year-old son's car after finding booze hidden under the front seat. Her classified ad read:

OLDS 1999 Intrigue: Totally uncool parents who obviously don't love teenage son, selling his car. Only driven for 3 weeks before snoopy mom who needs to get a life found booze under front seat. $3,700/offer. Call meanest mom on the planet.

I love her resolve and creative publicity of the punishment. If you read the hometown paper's version of the story, you can see that she loves her son but expects him to do the right thing.

Jim, his dad, and his brother were almost killed when hit by a drunk driver celebrating a promotion with a high-speed turn on the Georgia interstates. A drunk driver totalled my brother's car (with 5 people inside), a USPS mailbox, and a building one sunny afternoon. And worst of all, one night my mom, my brother, and our neighbors rushed to help someone after a terrible accident near our home and found the driver, a mother of school-aged children, dead, ejected, and pinned under her car.

When it comes to driving and alcohol, taking away the keys temporarily probably isn't lesson enough. I'm really proud of Jane Hambleton for going public with this important lesson for parents and young drivers.

Toys & Toxins: New Resource

Toys have many parents worried.. and for good reason. Some companies are arguing that it's okay for their toys to contain illegal levels of lead (like this RED blood-pressure cuff) as long it's not on the surface of the product. Relatedly, Fisher-Price (a Mattel company) refuses to pull lead tainted toys exceeding federal standards in states other than Illinois (from Consumer Reports blog).

Well, here's a little good news. Ecology Group, a Michigan environmental group is independently testing toys for 9 toxins that can be viewed through x-ray fluorescence. They report their findings in a great database at HealthyToys.org. I whiled away a couple hours cruising through this great site. You can even proposed more toys for them to test and subscribe to database updates.

I was relieved to see one of Ranger's favorite chewable baby toys get a pretty clean bill of health even though he quit chewing on it some time ago. And we crossed Wedgits off his Christmas list until they're PVC free.

Confused About Polycarbonate Bottles? Zrecs has answers

If you're concerned about Bisphenol-A in baby bottles and sippy cups, then you should definitely visit Zrecs.com's comprehensive overview of major manufacturers' products and attitudes. This directory is a great new resource.

Plus, the Zrecs folks are offering some BPA-free products from BornFree in Prizey's current giveaway:

Mom, It's Not Me, It's You: A New Study on the Genetics of Picky Eaters

For Ranger's second birthday I made him a banana cake. He's a banana fiend, so it seemed a logical jump. He (and my 35 year-old brother) refused to even try it as it was not familiar. I was disappointed, but hardly surprised.

I could be classified as a picky eater in recovery. When I actually started trying new foods, I found out I had been missing out. Ranger would be happy on the apple, grape, and cracker diet in perpetuity.

An interesting new study through University College London suggests that food reluctance is probably inherited as well as a self-preservation mechanism. Wow.

I thought this might reassure other parents who dread the "does he eat vegetables" dietary interview with the pediatrician. Apparently, most kids lose the majority of their fussiness by 5 and reintroduction of rejected foods can help.

For those of you looking to expand the palate and culinary experience of older kids, please visit Spatulatta- a great cooking site for kids by kids. I love to watch the videos and dream of future days when Ranger and I can cook together.

Goodbye, Tammy Faye

Whatever may be said about Tammy Faye [Bakker] Messner, she was a compassionate woman who led the evangelical community to embrace AIDS patients and other previously "untouchable" communities.

Jim and I strongly recommend the biographical documentary Eyes of Tammy Faye and her son's autobiography Son of a Preacher Man for a fuller portrait of this complex and caring woman and the controversy that surrounded her.