Classico Italiano Chef MasterClass at Mezzaluna from Saturday 13th November, InterContinental Dubai Festival City

 

Recall Alert: Graco Quattro and MetroLite Strollers

Graco Quattro and MetroLite Strollers

Recall Date: October 20, 2010

Name of Product: Graco Quattro and MetroLite strollers

Companies/Manufacturer: Graco Children’s Products

The Hazard: Infants can become entrapped in the stroller, causing cuts, bruises and difficulty breathing. The strollers have been blamed for four deaths between 2003-2005 and six injuries.

Description: Recalled items are Quattro strollers manufactured before November 2006 and MetroLite strollers manufactured before July 2007. These strollers were sold and distributed to stores between November 2000 and December 2007.

What To Do: Stop using the recalled strollers and contact Graco for a free repair kit. To order a kit, contact Graco at 877-828-40446 or visit gracobaby.com. For additional information, contact Graco at 800-345-4109 between the hours of 8 a.m.-5 p.m. Eastern time, Monday-Friday.

Read More http://www.ivillage.com/recall-graco-quattro-and-metrolite-strollers/6-b-140042?nlcid=bt|10-20-2010|#291537#ixzz12yvKfUUG

 

Fati’s Kitchen: classes, tips, workshops

 

Huge Recall: 10 million Fisher-Price Products Recalled for Safety Hazards

Please click on the link to read all about the recall.

Huge Recall: 10 million Fisher-Price Products Recalled for Safety Hazards.

 

Drowning – if your Summer holidays involves water, read this

It’s not a pleasant subject but we must all be aware of the dangers and the signs to look for – they are not the ones we would expect. And it’s not always the places we expect either. When my brother was 6, we were on holiday in Paris and he sat on the stony edge of a fountain in one of the parks. His back was to the water and there were several other people including kids doing the same thing. I was a teen at the time, just 3 feet away watching him turn his body to straddle the stone then in one flowing movement he lifted his other leg over and slid down into the water. I was rooted to the spot and couldn’t even shout out. Luckily the man sitting right next to him turned his head , saw what was happening and at the same time reached down with his hand and pulled my brother out by the collar just as he sunk completely under water. He didn’t even realise what was happening and thank God that man had reflexes! We did not make too much fuss aware that our reaction would affect him. For the next 2 yrs my brother would not go near water. He had spent at most 5 seconds totally under water.

Source: Mario Vittonne

The new captain jumped from the cockpit, fully dressed, and sprinted through the water. A former lifeguard, he kept his eyes on his victim as he headed straight for the owners who were swimming between their anchored sportfisher and the beach. “I think he thinks you’re drowning,” the husband said to his wife. They had been splashing each other and she had screamed but now they were just standing, neck-deep on the sand bar. “We’re fine, what is he doing?” she asked, a little annoyed. “We’re fine!” the husband yelled, waving him off, but his captain kept swimming hard. ”Move!” he barked as he sprinted between the stunned owners. Directly behind them, not ten feet away, their nine-year-old daughter was drowning. Safely above the surface in the arms of the captain, she burst into tears, “Daddy!”

How did this captain know, from fifty feet away, what the father couldn’t recognize from just ten? Drowning is not the violent, splashing, call for help that most people expect. The captain was trained to recognize drowning by experts and years of experience. The father, on the other hand, had learned what drowning looks like by watching television. If you spend time on or near the water (hint: that’s all of us) then you should make sure that you and your crew knows what to look for whenever people enter the water. Until she cried a tearful, “Daddy,” she hadn’t made a sound. As a former Coast Guard rescue swimmer, I wasn’t surprised at all by this story. Drowning is almost always a deceptively quiet event. The waving, splashing, and yelling that dramatic conditioning (television) prepares us to look for, is rarely seen in real life.

 

FREE Mama & Baby Morning Sunday 18th July 9am – 1pm @ Sharjah English School

 

Playing games makes your child clever

Why a farm shop in the nursery and a Hollywood studio in school could hold the key to success

Helen Rumbelow

Source: Times Online UK

Gabriella is a seven-year-old at a state primary school in Hertfordshire. But when her teacher asks her to put on a pair of giant gold heart-shaped glasses to read over her work, she is suddenly a child of the Russian revolution.

All around Goldfield school are touches of a new teaching system adopted in September. The approach — pioneered by a psychologist in Moscow in the 1920s — has just been rediscovered in the West. In the US it is now hailed by thousands of parents as a fast-track to success for their children. Greater research is being conducted to see if the dramatic advances seen in pilot nurseries are too good to be true.

Suddenly, the life’s work of Lev Vygotsky — who died a pariah of Stalin’s regime — has found its moment. Vygotsky predicted the latest breakthroughs in modern psychological science 90 years ahead of time.

At first as you wander around Goldfield, you don’t see much difference. Then I realise that I’m always asking Debbie Stevens, the headteacher, “how old are those children again?”, because I can’t quite trust my instincts. A group of three-year-olds solved the teachers’ block construction problem using concentration I would expect of six-year-olds. The six-year-old who I partnered in a game, firing numbers at each other to match a hand movement, left me a discombobulated mess.

The construction team pretended to be furniture makers for their dolls, with the teacher wearing a construction hat as building inspector.

 

How to make holidays special for children

We all want our children’s holidays to be special. Psychologist Linda Blair explains how to make them memorable for all the right reasons

Source: Times Online UK

Does it seem to you as if all the fun has gone out of parenting? It does to me. Parents these days are under enormous pressure to be “good parents” and to raise perennially happy and continuously successful children.

This is now so common that parenting has begun to feel more like a daunting task, instead of the mainly enjoyable and immensely satisfying part of our lives that it should be. That’s a real shame, particularly because the more anxious parents become the less chance they have of raising those happy and confident children they so desire.

Now is a particularly good time to rid ourselves of this stressful approach to parenting. With the summer holidays upon us, many parents are putting the details on their annual family holiday, worrying far too much about how to make it one that the kids will remember with delight for years to come. I’m convinced this is a relatively new phenomenom.I never remember my own parents showing the least concern about whether we’d enjoy our camping holidays in Colorado. They merely assumed that, because they loved spending two weeks in the mountains, we would as well — and of course they were right, as I shall explain later. So why have things changed? Why do we feel this heavy weight of responsibility nowadays for our children’s happiness?

 

Get a grip on your eating

It’s a simple manifesto for eating healthily and in moderation. Don’t lift a fork until you’ve read Michael Pollan’s new book

Source: Times Online

Human beings ate well and kept themselves healthy for millenniums before nutritional science came along to tell us how to do it. Eating in our time has become complicated — and needlessly so. Experts of one kind or another tell us how to eat, from doctors and diet books, to the latest findings in nutritional science, to government advisories and food pyramids. But for all the scientific baggage we have taken on in recent years, we still don’t know what we should be eating. Sorting through the long-running fat versus carb wars, the fibre skirmishes and the raging dietary-supplement debates, the picture is actually very simple. There are, basically, two important things you need to know about diet and health:

Fact one: Populations that eat a so-called western diet, consisting of lots of processed food and meat, lots of added fat and sugar, lots of refined grains, lots of everything except vegetables, fruits and wholegrains, invariably suffer most from western diseases: obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer.

Fact two: Populations eating a remarkably wide range of traditional diets, from diets high in fat, to those high in carbohydrate or protein, generally don’t suffer from these chronic diseases. What this suggests is that the human omnivore is exquisitely adapted to a wide range of food and diets. Except, that is, for one: the relatively new (in evolutionary terms) western diet that most of us are now following.

 

MMR scare Dr Andrew Wakefield struck off

Source:  Times Online

Raf Sanchez, David Rose

Andrew Wakefield, the doctor who triggered the MMR vaccine scare, has been struck off the medical register.

After nearly three years of formal investigation by the General Medical Council (GMC), Dr Wakefield has been found guilty of serious professional misconduct over “unethical” research that sparked unfounded fears that the vaccine was linked to bowel disease and autism.

Parents were advised yesterday that it was “never too late” to give their children the triple vaccine to protect against measles, mumps and rubella, as the case drew to a close.

The decision marks the culmination of the longest medical misconduct hearing in the GMC’s 150-year history, which has been going on since July 2007.

A fitness to practise panel has already found Dr Wakefield and two other doctors guilty of a series of charges over the way they conducted research on 12 children, published in The Lancet medical journal in 1998.