Clever Parents Blogs

FIRST LEGO League World Festival underway in Atlanta this weekend

25,000 of tomorrow’s engineers and mad scientists descended on the Georgia Dome in Atlanta this weekend.  The reason: a competition sponsored by FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) that challenges these young geniuses to build robots out of Legos. The robots, built using Lego Mindstorms technology, are put through the paces in nine tasks like climbing stairs. The winner is the team that is able to guide their robot to complete the tasks in the shortest amount of time. These are clearly not the Legos we played with when we were young…

The competition and FIRST were the brainchild of serial inventor Dean Kamen who invented the Segway Human Transporter and numerous medical inventions.  The purpose of the event, like all others from FIRST, is to raise the profile of science, math, engineering and technology by making them as cool as sports for today’s kids while highlighting the positive social impact of these fields.  The underlying theme of this year’s competition was helping people with disabilities.

Given the increasing importance of science and technology in our lives (not too mention the fun these kids seem to be having), encouraging the next generation of Bill Gates and Thomas Edisons seems like a very good idea.  We’re personally looking forward to robotic knees to replace our worn down ones…

Fast and healthy meals for the whole family

Looking for the perfect meal for your toddler? Join the club. As a healthy mom, I think I eat pretty well. I watch my fat intake, make healthy selections when we’re at restaurants, at home I watch portions and have a lifestyle and habits that tend to migrate towards the healthy… and now that I have babies I want to make sure that they have the absolute best start in life by eating good foods from day one. I breastfed my first son and now nurse my eight week old, I made my own baby food so that my son would be allowed the freshest of ingredients. Now that he’s graduated to ‘real-people’ food, I want to continue in that vein.

What I’d like to see is a repository for healthy and easy dishes for families. I don’t want to have to make different meals for my babies than for my husband and me. But it seems hard to come up with regular healthy meals that don’t feel like I’m repeating myself all the time. Here are a few of the meals that we eat pretty regularly… as well as some web sites with relatively extensive healthy meal suggestions… enjoy.

Breakfast:

• Scrambled egg whites with one or more of the following: sautéed scallions, peppers, spinach, reduced fat cheese, Canadian bacon
• Breakfast burritos (we use low carb whole wheat tortillas) with some egg form (i.e. like what’s mentioned above)
• French toast (w/ low carb bread)
• Whole wheat waffles, Boca sausage
• Of course, we also always offer fruit of some sort (pineapple, orange, apple, kiwi, grapes, etc.) and usually offer yogurt (don’t you love ‘yo-baby’?). Check out Stonyfield’s recipe site for a pretty comprehensive list of recipes for everything from breads to desserts, breakfasts to main dishes and smoothies. (All of which mysteriously include yogurt as an ingredient) ;-)

Lunch / Dinner:

• Sautéed or grilled veggies (broccoli, orange/red peppers, onions)
• sautéed spinach w/ garlic and onions
• Boca burgers - whose recipe site lets you browse recipes by product (i.e. Boca burger, Boca sausage, etc. or by meal … breakfast, snacks and lunch/dinner)
• Grilled meat (salmon, steak, pork chops, etc.)
• Mexican lasagna - this meal is really good – and you can find several good recipes on the main site, Meal Makeover Moms.com as well as order their book, The Moms' Guide to Meal Makeovers which claims to 'tackle what’s wrong with today’s all-American diet and offers realistic and delicious ways to improve it.'
• Black beans
• The old standby… grilled cheese on whole wheat (add avocado or tomato for a twist)

If you’re looking for someone to do the planning work for you, you may want to check out the six o’clock scramble site. Aviva Goldfarb has created a web site that includes easy dinner recipes for busy families. If you subscribe to her site, you receive five ‘flavorful and healthy dinner recipes with side dish suggestions’ emailed to you each week, easy to prepare dinners in 30 minutes or less most with fewer than 10 ingredients, along with an organized grocery list. For $5 a month, this may be the answer for you…

Happy healthy eating!

Did Enron and WorldCom wreck the Pediatric Vaccine Stockpile?

In a story that sounds like a repeat of last winter’s flu vaccine shortage, the Washington Post reported in a story that the federal government admitted recently that the Pediatric Vaccine Stockpile, designed to prevent shortages of the 8 shots that prevent against 11 childhood diseases, is desperately low.  In fact, there are no doses for 2 of the shots.

Some of the contributors to this shortage might surprisingly be the corporate villains of the last few years.  No, Bernie Ebbers and Ken Lay didn’t steal any vaccine (at least, they haven’t been formally charged with that…) but their alleged shenanigans led the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to crack down on bad accounting.  This crackdown led to a change in the way companies can recognize revenues and that is hurting the Vaccine Stockpile. 

As part of the program, vaccine manufacturers would sell the federal government millions of doses of vaccine and then keep the vaccine in their warehouses until the government requested it.  As the vaccines expired, the companies would replenish them.  In the past, those companies could recognize revenue when the vaccines were sold to the government, not when the government actually took possession of them.  Now however, auditors are saying that revenue can’t be recognized until the government actually takes possession of the vaccines.  This means that vaccine providers must set aside and warehouse doses today that they might not be able to claim as sales for several years.  The prospect of all the upfront work and hassle with only a future shot at revenue is hardly appealing to any company. 

According to the Post, representatives from the CDC (which manages the program), the SEC, and the vaccine companies are in discussions with ending this impasse.  For a more in-depth look at the problems and some of the proposed solutions, read the status report from Eddie Wilder, the Project Officer, Pediatric Vaccine Stockpile.  If this drags on, expect political fireworks over the issue…