New Gardasil Information for Every Parent

Every parent should see the video shown here. It's very important!!

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Lice is GOOD for you?

Most parents get the creepy-crawlies when they hear the dreaded "lice" word. If you've ever fought a battle against lice on your child's head, you know it's not an easy knock-out. The lice usually win for awhile before mom or dad are able to overcome them.

I saw a couple weeks ago online a study that said lice actually help us be creating a better immune system against allergies and asthma. Today, it's all over the internet. Speculation is that because of our current preoccupation of everything anti-bacterial, we may be creating over-active immune responses in ourselves and our children.

According to an article on Innovation Report:

"Their research, published in the open access journal BMC Biology, links the louse Polyplax serrata to a strong dampening of certain immune responses in wild wood mice. This implies that other mammals, such as modern humans, that develop in artificial environments may have less regulated, overactive immune systems precisely because they are not exposed to parasites throughout their lives.

The researchers speculate that the louse is able to exert some kind of immuno-suppressive effect, possibly directly by secreting some substance into the mice from its saliva, or indirectly by transmitting bacteria or other pathogens."

So mice that had lice had a less sensitive auto immune system. Could the increase in allergies and asthma be a result of our neverending quest for a sterile environment? I wonder if there is a relation between other auto-immune disorders, such as thyroid disease, as well.

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Dallas Texas Hotels

I have family in Houston, Texas and Austin, Texas and have been to both. It's nice to have family to stay with on vacation. As a kid, we went to the beach outside Houston in Galveston, Texas then went to a rodeo when we were visiting family in Austin.

If we wanted to check out the Dallas city life, we'd have to look for Dallas Texas hotels to stay in since there's no family to mooch beds off of.

Texas was great but the red ants we had to navigate around and the poisonous snake in the pond spooking the horses were more than enough for me. I really loved visiting but some of the species that live there can do so without me residing there as well.

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Almost Burned House Down - Twice!

We almost had two electrical fires in my daughter's bedroom this past year via the electrical outlets. It was supposed to have been fixed after the first time but then a different plug started shooting sparks. We shut down the circuit to her room so she's been without electrical plugs since this happened (she sure does miss her stereo). When the electrician was here today, he pulled the outlet out. We could see what had burned back in there. Scary!

We're going to have every outlet in the house pulled, the wiring checked and fixed as needed, and outlets replaced sometimes this week. It is something my husband and his dad could have done themselves but it probably wouldn't get done until later this year and it would take them days to do as opposed to several hours for a licensed electrician. I'd also feel better having the electrician take care of it. We are also having GFC outlets added to the bathrooms and kitchen. Our house doesn't have any of these and with the girls getting older, it's only a matter of time before the curling irons and blow dryers come out in the bathrooms. Better safe than sorry.

Electrical problems are nothing to mess around with. It's scary to think that we could've had a fire in the middle of the night in my daughter's bedroom. It almost happened twice!

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