We Are Expecting!

I have been so busy in my life that I totally neglected to upkeep this blog. I just got over a horrible bout with the Flu and Acute Bronchitis….Yuck!! All while we were in Orlando at Disney World. That was a mess for me but the kids and everyone else enjoyed themselves.

To the good news…..I am finally done with being sick, but I still have a cough. I really wish that would go away.

My husband and I are very proud to announce that we are expecting our 4th baby. I am due October 2nd. I will have a scheduled c-section so the baby will be born around the last week in September. Too bad it couldn’t be on my birthday (the 12th).

Right now I am 11 weeks and 3 days. I found out on Jan. 25th. I had to contact my Doctor right away because I have High Blood Pressure and High Cholesterol and I needed to stop the Cholesterol medicine and change the Blood Pressure medicine. I already have had 2 ultrasounds. One at 6 weeks 5 days and the other one at 9 weeks 5 days. I saw the heart beat and it was so strong. I am just excited to be finally hitting my 2nd trimester because the risk of miscarriage drops dramatically.

I go back to the Doctor on April 1st (yeah, I know it’s April Fool’s Day…lol) for just my monthly check-ups. Sometime around 16-20 weeks, I have to go to Vanderbilt in Nashville to get an extensive ultrasound because I will tun 35 years old at the end of this pregnancy. That means I get to have a 3D-4D ultrasound…I am happy about that, but I really do not want to travel to Nashville (an hour away) to get an ultrasound. I work in Nashville and travel 5-6 days a week out there and I cannot stand the trip…

But, it is for the health of my baby, so I will not complain too much there.

OK, I will keep updating my pregnancy here, just in case anyone is interested in keeping up with me.

From the first kick to the day he/she will be born.

It will all be here for you to read!

Take care and until next time……

-Angie-

I Need Your Votes Please!

I am one of the top 10 contestants in the White Cloud Mom and Baby contests and I need all the votes I can get.

Angie has asked that you come and see their submission to the Mom and Baby Moments, A Photo and Story Contest where entrants submit a unique photo and story of their favorite mom and baby moment! You can view their submission by following the link below.
http://www.mywhitecloud.com/momandbaby/VectorLeaderBoard_popup.jsp?uid=2345000000393&ucc=1D8E98BD.

Thank you so much!

Best Regards,
Angie Conn

Angie Conn dot Com

I have a new site I am going to be using so I will be bleeding out this one. I will not delete it, but I will start to not use it anymore.

You can find all the information on the new site that is on here. I just transferred everything over.

The new site is www.angieconn.com

I am working on a new theme for Angie Conn dot Com. I could use all the suggestions I can get.

Thanks to everyone that visits and I will see you over at Angie Conn dot Com.

Are Fathers responsible for overweight children?

According to THIS article, if your children’s father doesn’t play an active role in their lives it could be making them fat.

Well, that is not the case in my household. This picture is of my husband, Garry and our daughter, Jaymie. Garry is very active with our kids. There is baseball, softball, basketball, and soon to be wrestling and maybe football if my son decides to play this fall.

I quite don’t get it. If the father is not in the child’s life or he is just not an active parent, then why can’t the mom or other father figure play the role? In my honest opinion, I do not think an “unactive” parent makes your kids overweight. Here is what I think contributes to children’s weight gain:

1. Diet

2. Lack of Activity

3. Discipline

4. Video Games

5. Low Self Esteem

6. Peer Pressure

 

Here is some of the article of this study I found on Fathers Responsible for Fat Children:Study

Fathers who play less of a role in child rearing are more likely to have overweight or obese offspring, Australian researchers said.

 

A study of almost 5,000 youngsters revealed that fathers who do not set clear limits for their kids are more likely to have heavier children, according to the Australian Associated Press.

Dads who did lay down boundaries generally had children with a lower body mass index, said the study by the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute and The Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne.

You can read the rest of the article here: STUDY

Blogger Power: Project to Safeguard the Web for our Children

 

 

I was tagged by MotheringTimes for the following campaign:

 

 

The project Blogger Power is a campaign to safeguard the Internet for children against pornography. Do visit the site for more details about this project. This is a chance for blogger’s to unite for a good cause. Calling all blogger’s to Blogger’s Unite and Help Spread the word to protect our children from pornography on the Internet.
If you are a blogger, post the common sense request to all the “adult site” webmasters on your site. You can either write your own article about it, or simply copy-paste the following letter:

A Request To All Webmasters Of Adult Sites:
“Please require a password-protected login before allowing even free access to explicit adult content. We understand that selling porn is your business and we respect your right to make a legal living. But understand our legitimate concerns and work with us. You already have the “warning adult content” on your websites. Yet kids, who are not legal customers of your product, ignore the warning. So to prevent them from having direct access to explicit images, texts and sounds, the simplest way is to have a password-protected login. No more “free tours” before a visitor supplies basic information.”

Blogger’s help spread the word and make the web safer for our kids. Please tag 20 other blogger’s to spread the word. Here is my list of blogs:

1. Family Support

2. All the love in the world

3. BloggingBaby.com

4. Coffeegrounds

5. Day by Day Dad

6. Elises Happenings and Wondering’s

7. KellyMom.com

8. MomSquawk

9. Parenting Toddlers

10. Silkstation

11. Garry Conn Dot Com

12. The Mom’s Blog Experience

13. THE ONLINE BLOG

14. The Rooneys

15. Welcome to Nashville Soapbox

16. What Just Happened

17. Political Dishonesty

18. Truth Seekers and Speakers

19. Blog The Internet

20. Where the women blogger’s are

 

Please pass this on! Let’s protect our children!

Here is a link where you can view links to the entries made by other blogger’s who support this project.

 

Best Regards,

Angie (Aconn)

I Love Free Game Downloads

When I have free time I enjoy playing games online. I am pretty competitive in nature and enjoy playing card many different types of games online. Did you know that there are many places where you can download game software for free? I like to search the Internet and places that offer free software to play games. As a parent I sometimes have a little free time to kill, such as when our baby is taking a nap. Granted, I probably should be doing other things like cleaning the house or running a load of laundry. But you know how that goes… the work is never done!

One game I like to play is backgammon. Playing this game, to me, delivers a balance in strategy and luck (My two favorite elements in gaming). I found a great place to download backgammon software provided by BackgammonMasters.com. They have released their second installment of the BackgammonMasters’ Animation Series “Life According to Jean-Claude”. Jean-Claude may not know why or where the battle of Barbarossa was fought, but he can tell you that persistence is the key to winning any battle. Besides being an industry leader with their exceedingly large and frequent tournaments and prize promotions, BackgammonMasters.com has pulled out all the marketing stops and Jean-Claude is a key figure. The first installment of the series received a huge response as the BackgammonMasters rendered it interactive by offering prizes for answering trivia questions about the clip, making the next installments eagerly anticipated. If you enjoy playing backgammon, I would head over to BackgammonMasters.com and download their free software.

It’s hard for me to pass up free offers. It is especially hard for me to pass up free gaming software download offers! I have always enjoyed playing games and since the creation of the Internet and online games I have enjoyed playing them even more. My free time to do so is pretty limited though, but I guess that goes hand in hand with being a parent.

Kids Will Break Things

It is totally normal for kids to break things. Children are developing their hand and eye motor skills and that is one of the main reasons why they are clumsy. Most of the time kids don’t break things on purpose, they are just accident proned because they are in the process of fine tuning their hand and eye motor skills. We have a one year old baby girl and she is growing so fast and her mind is also expanding very fast. Babies are funny because their minds develop faster than their physical bodies can keep up. It takes many years for their bodies to catch up to their minds. It is so funny to see our baby grow and develop into a beautiful toddler.

Yesterday I was playing with my baby and I was holding her in my arms. She was having fun pulling and yanking on my hair. Quickly, without having any time to react, she grabbed my wrist watch and pulled it off my wrist, breaking the wrist band. Granted the watch I had was a Timex and wasn’t too expensive, but still this lead me to think, “If this happened to me, I am sure that it happens to other people”. And just because the watch I had was a cheap watch, there might be others who have an expensive watch that gets broke this way. Coming to realize this, I wanted to find out how someone could repair their watch if their watch band broke. I then found Watchband.biz and decided to write a sponsored ReviewMe.com advertisement about them. They claim to be the global leader in replacement bands for high-end and luxury watches, featuring HIRSCH, StrapCulture and other premium brands. In stock: over 5,000 quality watch straps. Upon investigating the site, I discovered that this site offered really great deals on replacement Watch Bands.

Kids will break things, and being parents we have to accept this and be prepared for the worst! And the summary of this story is, if you want to keep your wrist watch from breaking, I would totally suggest removing it while playing with your baby!

Happy Birthday Jaymie!

This Wednesday, April 11th, will be my little girl’s very first birthday!!!

Mommy , Daddy, Sissy, and Bubba love you bunches and bunches!!!

 

Chicken Pox Vaccine And It’s Effectivness

My son had this vaccine when he was an infant and he is almost 9 years old now. He has never had chicken pox yet. There is a new study I heard on the news that getting the vaccine only works like 80 to 85% and it is likely that you will need a booster chot to have it work like 90 to 95%. Here is the news article that I found.

 

FULL LINK HERE

 

BOSTON (Reuters) – Merck’s chickenpox vaccine Varivax not only loses its effectiveness after a while, but it has also changed the profile of the disease in the population, U.S. researchers reported on Wednesday.

The study confirmed what doctors widely knew — that the vaccine’s protection does not last long.

And with fewer natural cases of the disease going around, unvaccinated children or children in whom the first dose of the vaccine fails to work have been catching the highly contagious disease later in life, when the risk of severe complications is greater, they said.

“If you’re unvaccinated and you get it later in life, there’s a 20-times greater risk of dying compared to a child, and a 10 to 15 times greater chance of getting hospitalized,” said Jane Seward of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, who worked on the study.

The findings, reported fully for the first time in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine, have already had an impact.

They helped prompt the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices to recommend a booster shot between the ages of 4 and 6. The panel also said in its June 2006 report that children, adolescents and adults should be given boosters as well.

No one knows how long the effects of a second shot will last, said the research team, led by Sandra Chaves of the CDC.

The United States has been vaccinating against chickenpox, also known as varicella, since 1995. But tests have show that the vaccine is not very effective in 15 to 20 percent of children who only receive one dose.

A second dose will certainly provide extra protection, but it is not clear how much. “Instead of 80 to 85 percent efficacy, we’re hoping instead to see 90 to 95 percent for the second dose,” said Seward, acting deputy director of the CDC’s division of viral diseases.

The Chaves team used vaccination and illness data from Antelope Valley, California, northeast of Los Angeles, to track Varivax’s effectiveness.

The shots cut the number of cases by 85 percent between 1995 and 2004. In 1995 just 1 percent of the 2,794 reported cases were among children who had been vaccinated. In 2004, there were far fewer cases — 420 — but 60 percent were in vaccinated children.

While 73 percent of the youngsters who became ill in 1995 were under age 7, the rate dropped to 30 percent by 2004 because the children who got chickenpox tended to get it at an older age.

And when vaccinated children were infected, they tended to be sicker, probably because they were older.

“Children between the ages of 8 and 12 years who had been vaccinated 5 years or more previously were two times as likely to have moderate-to-severe breakthrough disease as were those who had been vaccinated less than 5 years previously,” the researchers wrote.

Last May another vaccine made by Merck to act as a booster for adults, Zostavax, was approved.

The chickenpox virus remains in the body for life and can be reactivated as shingles, a rash that can cause pain that persists for years.

Chickenpox is often considered a harmless childhood disease, but before vaccination, 100 children died each year from complications of chickenpox in the United States alone.

Baby Bumps and Bruises

As your baby gains mobility, accidents will happen and her head will get bumped at least a few times. Rest assured that your baby’s head is built to withstand the bumps and bruises of childhood and that most falls injure only the scalp, not the underlying brain. A scalp injury will normally bleed a lot and a bump will appear quickly.

Here are some helpful tips to treat a head wound:

 

1. Apply ice to the bump for 20 minutes to reduce swelling. If your child won’t cooperate and you can’t keep the ice on that long, don’t worry; it won’t make the injury any worse.
2. Stop any bleeding with a clean cloth.
3. Watch carefully for signs of concussion or large hematoma. If she is alert, walking, talking and playing like she was before the injury, she’s probably okay. As a precaution, keep her awake for at least the first hour after the injury, and then let her nap in short, 20-minute intervals.

 

 

Trust your instincts; even if she is behaving normally, but you feel something isn’t right, call your pediatrician. Better safe than sorry.