Want to know why I prefer Burger King over McDonald’s and Wendy’s?
No, it has nothing to do with the fact that a Whopper with Cheese would wipe the floor in an all-out burger death match against the the Quarter-Pounder and the Classic Single. It has to do with the fact that as a company, Burger King has accepted who they are.
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People constantly pick on my wife and I for the way we break up food for our son. But once we show them what he does if we don’t break things up, they understand. The kid is like a Hoover, or maybe these days its more fitting to say he’s like a Dyson, shoving whatever he can into his mouth without stopping.
This, of course, puts him in danger of choking, something that scares the shit out of me. Recently (twice in the past month) we’ve come face to face with this terror, and what saved our little boy was none other than his own gag reflex. I’ve been shocked to see just how powerful it seems to be, hurling chewed mush up to six feet across the room. All I can say is, “ALL HAIL THE MIGHTY GAG REFLEX!”
Now don’t go thinking that my wife and I will be counting on this little miracle of nature to save our boy if this should ever happen again. We will be enrolling in infant CPR and Heimlich Maneuver classes at the local hospital. In the meantime, here are some online instructional videos from The University of Washington School of Medicine (found via Dumb Little Man).
P.S. Do you know how hard it is to find a decent picture of a baby vomiting? I had to give up.
This past Tuesday, New Scientist published an article on their website in which they report on a recent study of the neurological happenings that take place in the brains of new fathers.
Preface: I am not a doctor and claim no medical expertise. The information in this post is a collection of publicly available knowledge and statistics on the subject of SIDS.
Now that I am a parent, one of my biggest fears (if not the biggest) is SIDS. The thought of losing my son quickly and without warning makes me more uncomfortable than I have ever felt before in my life. It has kept me up nights, made me physically ill, and, at at times when I just can’t seem to get it off of my mind, affected me to the point where I simply cannot function.
Like many expecting parents, my wife and I have been berated with mail advertising new baby products, offering discounts on purchases for the baby, magazine subscription offers, etc.
Normally, unsolicited mail takes a direct route to our trash and recycling receptacles, but the baby stuff… well that we take the time to look through it, all of it.
Maybe its because this is our first child, maybe its just because we’re paranoid, but we’re afraid that if we ignore anything baby related that crosses our paths, we might miss out on something, some tidbit of knowledge, that might make or break our attempts at parenthood.
Now we still end up throwing a lot of the stuff out. For the most part it is still just junk mail after all. One of the things we do hold on to though, are all of the ads for Cord Blood Banking. The two of us have mentioned the topic to each other as something we’d like to consider doing when the baby is born, but never had an in-depth conversation.
Since we are now two weeks away from the baby’s due date, and realistically, I could get a call at any moment that my wife has gone into labor, I felt it was time to get down to business and research the topic.
Flu season is in full swing, and last week a few of my co-workers all got their annual flu shots. Surprisingly this spawned numerous conversations, disagreements, horror stories and adamant declarations from individuals their neither they nor any member of their family will ever get a flu shot.
Every November, like clockwork, the reports start showing up in the newspapers and on TV. Clinics start putting out announcements about how the vaccine will be distributed. And people start bracing for the annual ailment onslaught that is “The Cold and Flu Season”
Yet every year, a shockingly high number of people don’t get a flu shot. Some procrastinate and eventually forget, some just can’t find the time, and others just flat out refuse.
When the flu shot itself has been around since 1945 and the flu is such a prominent, yet sometimes overlooked, presence in the modern health world, why is there as much controversy over the vaccine? Why does it spark so much break-room debate and horror stories? Why is the flu shot surrounded by so many myths and fears?
Fatherhood, Husbandhood, Work, Life, and anything else that matters to the modern male.
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