I thought I’d do something different this time and do an audio recording of my Quick Takes. (The last time I did this was here.) The actual text with links is under the cut.
For more Quick Takes, visit Kelly at This Ain’t The Lyceum.
Heading up north. Tomorrow morning, I’m heading up to northern California for a week with Daniel. (Jon has to work — Sundays are kind of big workdays for pastors.) It’s quality time for Daniel with my mom and dad as well as giving my father-in-law a chance to deal with his insane chemo regimen in peace. I’ve already got plans with my friend Rebecca and I might be able to see some other people while I’m there.
Thomas Joseph. Katie of Blessed with Full Hands and her family are in the process of adopting another baby from China and this one is a little boy who they have named Thomas Joseph. Katie explains the name and shows us a picture on her blog this week.
I like the idea even if it was illegal. A science teacher in Florida tried to get his teenagers to stop using their cell phones in class by using a cell phone jamming device. It was a brilliant idea… but it was illegal. The problem is that such jammers also disrupt GPS, law enforcement communications, wi-fi, and can prevent people from calling 9-1-1 in an emergency. Oops! He was suspended for five days.
Their parents should be proud. Five fifth grade boys stood up to a bully on behalf of a kid with special needs. The story is here. They sit with him at lunch, play with him at recess, and look out for him. They also pooled their money and got him a new PlayStation and some video games. This mama is getting teary while reading the article for the second time.
One dozen shawls for love. Twelve knitters are raffling off shawls to raise money for Preemptive Love which is using the money to help displaced women and children in Iraq. For details and pictures of the shawls, click here. My serious thanks go to Ginny for putting this together!
Baseball. I just looked at Yahoo Sports and the St. Louis Cardinals are beating the tar out of the Dodgers. To quote Sergio Romo, “that’s what’s up!!!!” I’m sure that my husband the Dodger fan would love to remind me that the Dodgers are two games ahead of the Giants in the NL West. Whatever!
A Quick Take on vaccines. Two weeks ago when I blogged on a list of vaccines derived from aborted fetal cell lines, my friend Kathleen left me this comment:
I’m guess I’m a bad prolifer because I never even researched or asked questions. I just vaccinate.
I would disagree with you on that, Kathleen. I think that you’re a fabulous pro-lifer but abortion isn’t as big of a part of your pro-life cause as raising awareness for Down Syndrome is. You are also in the same position I am in where we’ve watched our kids lie in the ICU with RSV (respiratory syncytial virus) which is a disease with an actual vaccine but one that is prohibitively expensive as it’s around $2000 per shot and it’s a 5-shot sequence. Having had that experience and having a “special kid”, I think we both can envision Julianna or Daniel getting measles or mumps or whooping cough and having another similar hospital stay as a result because they both have conditions which would be exacerbated by those diseases. We’re also not the only ones. I’ve heard from several other bloggers that they’re in the same boat and that said diseases would be catastrophic for their kids because of their health conditions. The thing keeping them safe is the rest of us getting vaccinated. It’s why I have the sometimes-unpopular viewpoint that refusing to vaccinate your kids is pure selfishness.
I love the cell phone jamming. When I started teaching high school right after college, the cool thing was to have the really high pitched cell phone ringer that adults couldn’t hear. But I was young enough to still hear it. The students were not so pleased with that.
It was nice hearing your voice! And 4 makes me feel better about the world.
I posted this on Twitter a few months ago with the “I am the herd” hashtag. I believe not vaccinating one’s children is on the moral equivalency of driving under the influence — they’re endangering themselves, sure, but they’re endangering an unknown (possibly high) number of innocent strangers far more than their own selves, and that is not how civilisation works. Even worse, they’re endangering their own children, not just other people’s children.
(Similarly, I despite smokers. I’m allergic to something in tobacco smoke — possible the tobacco itself? — and get hives and have trouble breathing, which is unpleasant, but the serious cancer risks from secondhand smoke are such that I don’t understand why someone values their own pleasure over strangers’ health and lives.)