Swine Flu in the City

I absolutely love this "information visualization" depicting the safety of the H1N1 vaccine. As a mother of a 13 month old baby girl, I would love to get my paws on the vaccine for Una. Despite city and federal efforts, it is still impossible to find the vaccine in NYC. More on that later...

A New, New Year Resolution

It's been a long while since I last posted anything on my blog. I failed to keep resolution number one which I posted on 1/7/08, obviously. I did, however, fulfill my promise to organize and annotate my delicious site. Anyway, a lot has happened since January 2008: I got married, had a baby, and starting working part-time. With all of that in mind, I decided that it was time to resurrect my blog and shift focus -- somewhat. I hope to weave in public health issues that I find interesting. I also plan to blog on family related things too. And I plan to blog whenever I find the time and/or inspiration to blog.

At present, I have been trying to get Una to take her first nap of the day. Nearly an hour has passed. In sum, she's a terrible sleeper/napper. She's 13 months old. We just finished two weeks of the Ferber Method of sleep training. We've been anti-sleep training all along since it seemed pointless to train a baby to sleep when he/she reaches monthly milestones interfering with whatever sleep success one may have achieved. However, after 13 months of sleepless nights for everyone we decided that we needed to change gears. The Ferber Method was gentler than I originally thought. One doesn't abandon the baby all together, but rather allows the baby to cry for measured intervals while visiting the baby, caressing the baby, hugging the baby at each interval. The big change for us was not picking her up. It was extremely rough for the first week, but she's sleeping *much* better. We still have major hurdles each day and night, but at least she is not waking every hour. Unfortunately, the hour has passed and she's been crying throughout which means that the first nap attempt is over. Hopefully we will have better luck a bit later today. In any case, I've attached a photo of Una while she was sleeping for all of three minutes during her fake nap.