transposable element

hah, i’ve finally mustered the courage to play with my cpanel. am still groping, but at least i can now upload and edit templates without having to bother AnP each step of the way.

so bear with me; if you see a different template each time you visit, well… i may be atypical, but i’m still a female

according to jan, this is a shipload of mandarin oranges, with vikings on board the sailboat. it must still be docked, since there’s a tree at the far left, and it must have been spring, considering the tree’s sparse canopy. or it could have been a coconut tree. see the sword on the bottom right? what’s with boys and violence?!?

for the longest time, i’ve hesitated putting my full name anywhere on the web. in fact, i think you won’t find it in this blog. nor did i ever mention exactly where i live. of course, i can’t prevent it coming up in readers’ comments, although i’ve tried to edit where i can. but it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out those things, if you know where to click. call me paranoid, but it kind of leaves me feeling vulnerable. afterall, people have been able to pull tricks and scams, even without being armed with info that inadvertently gets divulged in this blog. how much more potential damage can be done, if someone were to purposefully use info in this blog for devious, evil agenda?

jadevine points out:

we know the warnings parents should give their children about online behavior, such as not giving out personal information and photos to people they don’t know. What makes blogging so different?

and it doesn’t stop at you, in your own blog. i could, for example, have used jadevine’s real name, since i know her off-blog, anyway, and as some bloggers often point out, you can write anything in your own blog, right? but i recognize her preference to remain anonymous to the larger blogging public, even if it’s not explicitly indicated. do you think we put our children in danger by putting their photos and other bits of info about them online? afterall, we never know just where our photos end up. karen and marketman, for example are currently battling it out with the philippine inquirer about photos that have been stolen from their blogs (while it has been common for bloggers to nick photos from other traditional publications, how often would you encounter a national newspaper stealing from bloggers?). maybe jan should remain incognito?

how much personal information do you give out in your blogs? and when you post about other people, how much info do you divulge?

there’s something fundamentally wrong here. the phone does not have dial tone, but here i am publishing this post. and i thought one first has to have a telephone connection to get to the internet.

the little man has been sick since last week. hubby had to take the day off friday as i had a class to go to. we figured that since i had more people depending on my arrival than he did, it made more sense for him to take the day off rather than me cancelling my class. what started out as what seemed to be like the regular flu developed into mild pneumonia so we decided that jan take the rest of this week off kindergarten as well. and like last week, hubby will take the day off and sit with him. which sort of works out, but made me think of how it will be like if take on the challenge of a full-time job. what happens when you’ve got no relatives nor sitter you can leave a sick child with? assuming you can assuage your guilt of leaving a sick child at all.

early on, we found out that jan breaks out in rashes when coming into contact with cow’s milk and products made out of cow’s milk. but slowly, the last few weeks, he has been showing greater and greater tolerance, and he is now able to finish a cup of yoghurt or a slice of cheese without breaking into hives, nor suffering from diarrhea. because jan is slowly outgrowing his milk allergy, we have been getting complacent and less vigilant with what he puts in his mouth. he himself knows what he can and cannot eat. he asks if he’s not sure and readily accepts the fact if he can’t.

nuts, however, is still an unknown territory. all i know is that he is highly allergic to peanuts, and the panic and hysteria i was thrown into the very first time he showed allergy symptoms were enough for me never to try any nut ever again. and just two days ago, jan and i took the whole of 4 hours ridding his body of peanuts he unknowingly ate. it took 4 heaving fits, 4 mopping duties, 5 changes of clothes, three trips to the toilet, 30 drops of antihistamine, a layer of cortisol cream and hours of cooing and consoling to get the peanuts in that one bite of butterfinger out of his sytem.

but is he allergic to almonds, walnuts, pine nuts and other tree nuts? we simply don’t know. we’ve simply decided to scrap nuts off the menu altogether, rather than subject him to an “oral food challenge” i.e., deliberately introducing a suspect food to see if there would be allergic reactions.

we could have had him take the skin allergy test. but we worried that such a test would be traumatic, since it involved injecting small amounts of possible antigens (allergy-causing compounds) just beneath the skin. about 20-30 of them. my husband had it a couple of years ago in an attempt to pinpoint the cause of some rashes he has been having, but it did not give a definitive result. so we thought it wasn’t worth it to put jan to so much stress, possibly into a trauma with medical procedures and devices, if it would not provide us any answers anyway.

we’re hoping jan will outgrow his nut allergy just the same way he did with milk. the john hopkins children’s center say about 20% of nut allergics do.

“Allergic reactions to tree nuts as well as peanuts (which are not nuts but legumes) can be quite severe, and they are generally thought to be lifelong,” says senior author Robert Wood, M.D., director of the Division of Allergy and Immunology at the Children’s Center. “Our research shows that for some children, however, lifelong avoidance of these nuts, found in countless food products, may not be necessary.”

In the United States, an estimated one to two percent of the population is allergic to tree nuts (almonds, pecans, walnuts, cashews, Brazil nuts, hazelnuts, pine nuts, pistachios and macadamia nuts), peanuts or both. Wood and colleagues previously reported that as many as 20 percent of children outgrow peanut allergy and recommended that allergists periodically retest their patients. The current study explored whether the same held true for tree nuts.

Wood and colleagues evaluated 278 children, ages 3 to 21 years old, with a known allergy to tree nuts. Nine percent passed oral food challenges, the standard test to prove a child has outgrown a food allergy. Fifty-eight percent of children with TN-IgE levels of 5 kilounits per liter or less also passed the challenge.

“These findings give allergists a safe guideline in deciding whether to advise their patients to continue avoiding tree nuts, or whether it’s time to try an oral food challenge to see if they’ve outgrown the allergy,” says Wood. He cautioned that oral food challenges should be presented only under the close supervision of an allergist.

next time we’re with his pedia, i’ll have to ask whether jan’s TN-IgE levels can be determined (whatever that is).

i’ve been trying to ignore it, but its like you’re just walking along your merry way, minding your own business being who and what you are, and here comes a stalker along, tutting at your strut, but nevertheless following you at every turn. just when you thought he’s off your trail, he pops right beside you and matches your pace step for step, egging you for a race.

i’m really not up for a competition of this sort at the moment, but ah, zeus help this creature when i decide to oblige.

according to today’s cnn report:

…the Kansas Board of Education approved new public school science standards Tuesday that cast doubt on the theory of evolution.

The 6-4 vote was a victory for “intelligent design” advocates who helped draft the standards. Intelligent design holds that the universe is so complex that it must have been created by a higher power.

Critics of the language charged that it was an attempt to inject God and creationism into public schools in violation of the separation of church and state.

something doesn’t sit right. if something is complex, it just means i have to work harder to figure it out. and if i can’t figure the answer out, it doesn’t mean there isn’t any. there are topics i’m not too proud to admit ignorance. and theology is one, so i’m gonna stop that train of thought just right there.

so after all the advances we’re reached, after all of darwin’s hard work to prove the concept of evolution, humanity comes back to this. ah, ashes to ashes, huh?

in jan’s kindergarten, they have a huge bathroom, with 4 kiddie-sized sinks and three toilet cubicles. all are completely communal, and there are no designations according to gender. one day at home, as i heaved jan atop the loo (yes, boys here are taught to sit while taking a leak), he asked:

“mama, why do girls have buttocks on the front, too?”

dang! i thought i still had a few years to review for this question.

ok. so halloween is over. we’ve just the lantern parade on friday to get over with and on to the most -awaited, most commercialized event of the year!

technically, i’ve started my christmas shopping. a few weeks ago, i bought five english books for jan, and figured, well, he doesn’t have to have all of them all at the same time, right? so i’ve put aside two and decided to place it next month under the tree instead (i hope i find it before christmas somewhere under all these debris i’ve got here, though). so that’s one person down, another to go. ah, men! why is it always so difficult to think of presents for men? the fact that hubby is the least gadget-giddy person i know doesn’t help either. i could get him something like this car gps navigation system, so he’d stop relying on me to read the map while he drives (in effect, it’ll be a gift for both of us. clever, eh?), but at $700 a pop? way off budget! let’s wait for the prices to drop. give it a few more months and surely, like digital cameras, portable navigation systems will be for peanuts… well, value-added peanuts.

so, suggestions? no tech-gadgets, please. and remember, i’m *still* not rolling in money.