In celebration of World Breastfeeding Week, a sucking marathon is planned for tomorrow.

The Nurturers of the Earth in the Philippines has organized the first Guinness World Record for Simultaneous Breastfeeding in multiple sites. They have gathered more than 20,000 women in 400 countries to participate in this event, which will take place at 10:00 am your local time on Wednesday August 8.

This same group broke the Guinness Record for simultaneous breastfeeding in a single site when they were able to gather 3,451 nursing moms all together.

The worldwide event will kick off in New Zealand with hundreds of women breastfeeding simultaneously and will finish 23 hours later at the dateline in Samoa. Every mom who attends her local event will be counted by two people, and at least 25 moms need to be in attendance for the location to count.

We all know the benefits breastfeeding holds, but for many different reasons, some women choose to not or cannot breastfeed their babies. In the US, breastfeeding is at a record high with 74% of mothers breastfeeding their infants for some period of time. Compared to the 24% in 1971, these are great trends!

If you wish to participate in this world record, check your local papers or contact your country’s coordinator to find the closest location for you.

Posted by Mally

Dangerous Blinds: The CPSC announced a recall of window blinds sold exclusively at Lowe’s stores. Basic Blindz have pull chords that are looped. This type of chord is a strangulation hazard for young children. Consumers should stop using the blinds and contact contact Springs Window Fashions toll-free at (866) 305-8652 for a retrofit kit.

Big Bang Explained: A University of Iowa researcher believes he has created a mathematical analysis for the vocabulary explosion toddlers tend to experience at around 18 months. The explosion occurs, he reports in the current journal Science, because toddlers are learning more than one word at a time, and more moderately complex to complex words than simple ones. The professor notes, “Using computer simulations and mathematical analysis, I found that if these two conditions are true, you always get a vocabulary explosion.”

Dangerous Baby Bottles? A group of scientists has published a statement in the journal Reproductive Toxicology in which they warn that bisphenol A (BPA), an estrogen-like chemical compound found in many everyday plastic items, including baby bottles, can be found at much higher levels in humans in the US than was previously thought. They report that the compound can pose adverse health risks, particularly to a developing fetus.

Lunch On the Go: New York City moms and babies celebrated World Breastfeeding Week by staging a mobile nurse-in on the city’s subway trains. They were joined by state Sen. Liz Krueger. “It is totally legal and appropriate to breast-feed your baby anytime, anyplace that baby needs to be fed,” said Krueger, who is pushing the Breastfeeding Mother’s Bill of Rights in Albany.

Sponsored by the World Alliance for Breastfeeding Action, this year’s theme for World Breastfeeding Week is”Breastfeeding: The 1st Hour”, emphasizing the importance of getting nursing underway pretty much right after birth. From the site:

Initiation of breastfeeding within the 1^st hour of birth is the first and most vital step towards reducing infant and under-five mortality, by reducing the overwhelmingly high neonatal mortality rate. Save ONE million babies – beginning with one action, one hour support and one message: beginning breastfeeding within the 1^st hour of birth!

The WABA notes that World Breastfeeding Week is being celebrated this year in over 120 countries.

La Leche League USA reminds us that World Breastfeeding Week is also an opportunity to commemorate and recommit to The Innocenti Declaration, which was adopted in 1990 by the WHO/UNICEF participants in the organizations’ global breastfeeding initiative. The Declaration’s aim is to protect, promote, and support breastfeeding:

As a global goal for optimal maternal and child health and nutrition, all women should be enabled to practise exclusive breastfeeding and all infants should be fed exclusively on breastmilk from birth to 4-6 months of age. Thereafter, children should continue to be breastfed, while receiving appropriate and adequate complementary foods, for up to two years of age or beyond. This child-feeding ideal is to be achieved by creating an appropriate environment of awareness and support so that women can breastfeed in this manner.

So if you’re pregnant and planning to breastfeed your baby, the message to you is nurse early and often!

The message to the rest of us? Support nursing mothers and the policies that help them achieve their breastfeeding goals. These women are giving their babies a healthy start in life, and that’s something we should all get behind.

Posted by MommaSteph.

Lead in children’s toys and gear is a bugaboo of mine, and I’ve been squawking about it for almost a year now (for example, here, here, and here), so I wasn’t particularly surprised at the recent recall of wooden Thomas the Tank Engine toys. Once you hear about lead in lunchboxes, of all things, is lead in a toy train really all that surprising?

Maybe not, but boy howdy, the Thomas recall has really caught people’s attention, at least in my little circle. As soon as the news hit I had phone calls and emails from concerned family members and friends (I have two Thomas fans underfoot, but as it happens, no wooden Thomas trains).

But more importantly, in the wider world, the activist group MomsRising has put up a petition asking Congress and the Consumer Product Safety Commission to prioritize the testing of children’s products for toxic chemicals. Can’t say if it will make a difference, but I signed on. People, let’s get the lead out of children’s gear, please. Let’s ask the CPMC to put some teeth into its efforts to keep manufacturers and importers from bring lead toys and children’s gear into this country (most of it coming from China, which has also recently given us deadly pet food and hazardous toothpaste).

It should be a no-brainer: Stop the import of lead toys and children’s gear. Let’s allow our kids to hang onto their natural allotment of IQ points.

Posted by MommaSteph.

Jill Youse had a freezer full of breast milk and an idea: Why not get her excess supply to orphanages in Africa, where it could do some good? She contacted an orphanage in South Africa, hooked up with a staff member who was in the States and on her way back to her country, and sent off her “liquid gold”. When her story got out, other moms with freezer stashes began contacting Ms. Youse about donating their excess milk, and the International Breast Milk Project was born. Only problem was, Ms. Youse needed someone to take on the process of screening donors, testing and pasteurizing the milk, and storing it for safe shipping. Thus began her partnership with Prolacta, a for-profit milk bank. Then Oprah spotlighted the project, and the influx of donations was overwhelming.

Prolacta publicly committed to processing 10,000 ounces of breast milk for African orphanages. But with all of the interest in the program, particularly after the “Oprah effect”, some calculated that IBMP had to have collected much more than 10,000 ounces. Was there a milk overage? And if so, was Prolacta selling it? As Jennifer Laycock, aka The Lactivist, was asking in May, was the whole “get your milk to African orphans” project a scam?

It has to be thanks to Jennifer that Prolacta and IBMP have come forth with a full accounting of what has happened with the donor milk collected thus far and what their future arrangement will be. Specifically, the project has collected 55,000 ounces of breast milk so far, of which 15,000 has been shipped to Africa. The rest of this milk, 40,000 ounces, will also be sent to African orphanages.

As of June 1, however, only 25% of all donated breast milk will be sent to Africa. The remaining 75% will be purchased by Prolacta for $1 an ounce. This milk will be theirs to process and sell, as breast milk or “human milk fortifier”, which is added to breast milk and, according to the company, may be “critical to premature infants who require food with more protein and calories than mothers’ milk can provide.” The money Prolacta pays for the breast milk will be sent by the IBMP to Africa for the purpose of setting up their own breast milk collection and processing centers. Prolacta will continue to do the donor screening and milk processing (transport of the milk is donated by shipping companies).

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Pampers in the Pump? Probably not. Treehugger reports that a Japanese company has found a use for used disposable diapers: They are burning them for fuel. Super Faiths is fermenting the diapers with aerobic bacteria, evaporating the excess water, and using heat to destroy pathogens. The result is “a fuel with capable of generating 5,000 kcal/kg.” (Via Daddy Types, who isn’t buying into the hype because, 1. the diapers in question are actually adult diapers, 2. disposable diapers in Japan are mostly made of paper, unlike those we use here, so it’s not going to solve our landfill issues, and 3. Super Faiths was apparently founded by a big executive in the largest domestic diaper manufacturer in Japan, so diaper-to-fuel propaganda needs to be scrutinized with a wary eye.)

I feel a twinge of self-consciousness whenever I offer my boys PB&Js for lunch. Can something that easy and yummy be good for them?

Who cares� It’s good for the planet!� That’s the rallying cry of the PB&J campaign.  Here’s some food for thought from the sandwich patrol:

• Serving up a PB&J instead of a meat or fish based sandwich or chicken nuggets saves 2.5 of carbon dioxide emissions.
• Have a PB&J instead of a hamburger and and save water - 250 gallons!
• A single PB&J saves 12 to 50 square feet from “deforestation, over-grazing, and pesticide and fertilizer pollution.”

OK, the PB&J folks know that just eating a PB&J doesn’t miraculously put that water the hamburger cow drank back into the trough.  But, they note, every time a consumer doesn’t choose a meat-based lunch, he or she is sending a message to food producers to reduce the animal output.

And make your PB&J out of whole grain bread, use a fruit jelly without a lot of added sugar and an all-natural peanut butter, and you really do have a pretty well-rounded lunch. (Don’t try to sell my mother on that, though.  I’ll have to pry her jar of Jif creamy out of her cold, dead hands!)

Posted by MommaSteph.

Anticipating a newcomer� If you’re interested in going green with your newborn, TreeHugger has some tips. Here’s a summary:

1. Diapers: It takes between 200 and 500 years for disposable diapers to decompose, so even if there has been some back and forth over whether there’s a difference in environmental impact - throwing out disposables or washing cloth diapers - some folks are just going to feel better going cloth. (Here’s more on the diaper vs. cloth environmental impact.) And cloth diapers have come a long way since I was a baby, when they were all about awkward shapes that needed to be folded and bunched and those scary pins. You can get them fitted, with velcro or snaps, and in a variety of fabrics, including hemp and bamboo. If you still want to go disposable (or some combination), some brands are made of plant-based plastics, and can be composted.

2. Breast or bottle: This one we all know.

3. Baby food: TreeHugger recommends you skip the jars and make your own. All fine and good, but frankly, I figured the good folks at the baby food companies probably had a more sanitary set up than I did in those slip-shod first year baby days. Plus you can get organic baby food that’s not much more expensive than the conventional kind. But if you’re up for cooking and mashing a sweet potato, hats off to you.

4. Clothing: Skip the fancy duds, says TreeHugger. They will just get stained and outgrown quickly. “The baby couture might be better replaced with convenient one-piece suits in practical white terry cloth. ” Practical� What’s so practical about white� However, I will say this: Both my boys wore the same five outfits (comfy, stretchy, and easy off and on) 90% of the time. Whatever was at the top of the clean laundry pile, I put on them. So if you’re like me, you really don’t need a lot of baby clothes.

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Another baby to kiss: Next month, Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Washington) will become the fifth woman to give birth while serving in the US Congress. The Congresswoman is due May 29. She and her husband Brian Rodgers, a retired Navy officer, have not decided on a name for the newcomer, though they have learned that it is a boy. The Congresswoman noted, “One of the positives about this job is you do have a flexible schedule. I hope that allows me to spend quality time with the baby…Also, I have a spouse. He’s excited about being a caregiver.”

Old Beef Recall: More than 100,000 frozen beef patties�sold a year ago in five states - California, Arizona, Idaho, Oregon and Washington - have been recalled after five children became sick with E. coli. The patties were sold under the following brand names:

• Fireriver
• Chef’s Pride
• Ritz Food, Blackwood Farms
• California Pacific Associates
• C&C Distributing
• Golbon
• Richwood

Consumers are advised to check their freezers and destroy or return any hamburger patties and ground beef sold under the above brands that were produced in April-May, 2006.

Make mine well-done: In other recall news, a Pennsylvania beef company is recalling 250,000+ pounds of beef products because of possible E. coli contamination after several consumers became ill a month ago from eating rare or medium rare steak at Hoss’s Family Steak and Sea Restaurants.

Happy Earth Day! This sitehas some tips for how to help your kids celebrate and get involved.

Responding to a lawsuit filed by the Sierra Club and a group called Improving Kids’ Environment, the Environmental Protection Agency has agreed to take more aggressive steps to preventing children’s toys, jewelry, and other gear that contains high levels of lead from entering the country and winding up in vending machines and on store shelves. Initially, the Sierra Club and IKE petitioned the EPA and Consumer Products Safety Commission to ban children’s jewelry that contained lead, but the petition was rejected; hence, the lawsuit. (See our post from last fall about lead in children’s jewelry.)

As part of this agreement, the EPA will ask the Consumer Products Safety Commission to place greater emphasis on quality control for all children’s products. In addition, the agency will tighten safeguards and will take steps to require importers and manufacturers of children�s products to provide health and safety studies on the potential presence of lead in their products…

Laws requiring companies to notify the EPA immediately of substantial health risks from their products have been largely ignored by importers, distributors and retailers, and the EPA will now enforce those standards more stringently.

Regular readers of MomSquawk know that lead in kids’ gear is a topic that really makes my blood boil, so I’m very grateful for this news…and yet…the new plan sounds pretty toothless. Why don’t we just fine the companies importing and marketing the lead toys, jewelry, gear, etc.? Wouldn’t that be a more muscular deterrent than just putting out the word that the government is going to “scrutinize” lead toy importers?

A couple weeks ago I had some email exchanges with Julie Vallese, the CPSC’s Director of Information and Public Affairs on this very topic. A transcript of our email exchange is at the end of this post. If you read through them you might understand why I get the impression that punishing companies for making money by importing cheap, lead-laden children’s gear from China is not a top priority at the CPSC. (If you regularly check the recall site, you’ll notice that almost all recalls due to lead content are of products manufactured in China. See also an earlier post on the CPSC and lead in lunchboxes.)

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