I can understand how Americans can be skeptical of homebirth in a nation and medical system that has less than 1% (0.65%) of births in the US occur purposefully at home. Fear based propaganda has been filtering through our society since Doctors began profiting from deliveries. Homebirth specific Midwifery practices have been bullied by the medical establishment, our legal system and deemed ‘allegedly’ illegal in some states for no other apparent reason than control and money. Meanwhile, in states that do allow homebirth, stipulations on midwives include high priced insurance liability premiums (Often this can cost between 30% – 50% of their annual income depending on the size of their practice), plus they are required to have a Physician affiliated with a Hospital Maternity Dept. in order for them to have “rights” to continue treating their patient once on Hospital property if the delivery deems a Hospital visit necessary.

My Daughter Naya's Birth at home

I believe that those who have never been to a homebirth are unaware and instinctively underestimate how VERY prepared a midwife comes when attending a homebirth. Most midwives come equipped with 3 giant bags of sterile instruments, drugs and oxygen just waiting at the sidelines to spring into action should the need arise. The midwife’s assistant, typically a CNM or in training to get Certification, is present to hand her what she needs the moment she asks for it in the event of an emergency. You are also responsible for providing a birthing kit that you purchase for typically under $40 that includes all of the basic necessities for a birth plus personal and infant care after.

With all of the hype that Hospitals boast about their safe environment and security they carry significant risk too. The most prevalent difference being that your newborn never has to leave your arms in a home setting delivery to be put into a warmer, handed to a stranger and routinely if not abrasively suctioned or diapered and dressed without you. I have finally seen a change in the last 20 years where they no longer whisk babies to nurseries to be brought in at the nurse’s convenience to be fed after probably already having been introduced formula without consent. In the Hospitals you are putting you and your infant in potential contact with new antibiotic resistant infections. I have heard various stories from friends and documentaries showing Hospital maternity nursing staff pressuring mothers, hoping for a natural birth, into using unnecessary drugs that slow birth, seep into breast milk plus put a mother at risk of spinal injuries and infections. Surgical procedures typically result from the concept that they need to “save” the baby and liability of the hospital has taken precedents over patient choice and as a result C-Sections are now performed at a rate over 30% of all hospital births where only 5-7% are actual emergencies. Doctors also feel the freedom to perform episiotomies under the assumption that “we have to get the baby out!” I sometimes wonder if they secretly think “Oh well, you’re already numb down there anyway, besides you weren’t thinking of having decent sex ever again anyway right?”

Instead of being skeptical of just homebirth at the very least be skeptical of BOTH then do the real research to find out which one is right for you. Every pregnant woman should start by watching “The Business of Being Born” I am 100% positive that, as a species, if homebirth was not “safe” we as a whole human race would have died off long before we invented hospitals. As a mother of 2 children born at home I consider myself lucky to have had the knowledge available giving me the confidence in my decision to homebirth. As a result I have been seriously considering becoming a Doula. A doula is an assistant who provides various forms of non-medical and non-midwifery support (physical and emotional) in the childbirth process. I want to impart my knowledge and experience to those who are curious about the process and want to play an active role in their pregnancy and birth. Feel free to email me about anything from questions or to have me as your doula at christinecox@eripa.com.

Given that my son is only in 2nd Grade and that I am already sick of fund-raising it is probably safe to say that our economy is playing no small role in my resistance. I am solicited by a multitude of fund-raising efforts throughout every school year. Some of the cash getting efforts I am fully supportive of but others I am less than enthusiastic about. I also feel offering the same old thing year in year out gets a bit stale after 6 years with just one kid going Kindergarten through 5th grade.

What really got me thinking about how this can be changed was the recent Time for Kids fund-raiser. Parents are supposed to fill out a booklet full of postcards giving away the addresses of friends and family members who in turn will receive a list of magazines they can subscribe to for deeply discounted rates in exchange for the school library to receive “current event” based reading material. We received not one, not two but 3 pieces of paper URGING us to fill out said booklet. One from the Company promoting the fund-raiser, one from the Teacher and one entire page letter from the Principal. Kind of overboard and a bit wasteful in paper but that is only one persons opinion.

My son’s school also participates in Market Day a monthly ordering of bulk frozen entrees, side dishes and desserts plus room temp drinks and snacks that “aid” busy parent too involved to plan a home cooked meal. A close friend of mine bought so much Market Day I think she single-handedly supported their monthly quota for orders. I had the opportunity to sample a wide variety of their menu/ catalog and for my personal opinion/taste their selection could stand improvement. The do offer healthier meal/food options which is favorable but not enough for me to want to place an order. Many a month I have seen an email mentioning they did have enough money in orders to place the big order leaving parents having to wait until the next month for an order. The conveniences of the program, in addition to supporting the school, are online ordering and pick up right at the school instead of trekking all the way to the BJ’s or Costco, considerably farther away and requires a membership fee.

I love the Scholastic Book Fairs. Our school usually hold 2 every year plus 2 more order form hand outs. We always have at least 1 book to buy, if not more, and encouraging reading is healthy for the mind. I’ve never heard of junk books, reading doesn’t cause obesity and I’m pretty sure you can’t “veg out” in front of a good book. At least not the ones they sell in the Scholastic catalog.

Now another fund-raiser our school has chosen to take part in is Joe Corbi’s. This is a fund-raising effort where you child is expected to solicit your coworkers, family members and neighbors for orders to buy Frozen Pizza, Cookie Dough and Soft Pretzels. We tried all of the products offered but came to the conclusion that none of these were right for our family. I’d much rather solicit my coworkers, family members and neighbors for orders to buy popcorn from Popcorn Palace. Based on what I found the popcorn can be purchased as just the corn kernels or flavored and coated sweet or salty to your taste and generally fewer calories than all the carbs that come in any individual portion of a pizza, pretzel or cookie dough offered.

The Holiday Shoppe our school holds every year totally rocks. It provides the kids with inexpensive gifts for the children to buy for their family members and volunteers help wrap and label the presents for Christmas. The school store is probably neat too but all my son ever comes home with is a bunch of silly erasers at 25 cents each. Oh well …his money, his choice.

I like the idea of collecting Box Tops and found another collection idea environmentally conscious involving The Power of Recycling. Collecting old cell phones as well as toner and ink cartridges they supply the collection boxes and return label postage for a check made out to the school which sounds both easy and cool! Other great environmentally friendly fund-raisers can be found at Greenraising.com

A suggestion our school counselor offered was, creating a cookbook which could generate interest offering new exciting meal ideas to families eating in more often. There could also be an opportunity to offer local businesses ad space and/or coupons to boost sales for everyone. I know I have some recipes I would be happy to share for the benefit of the school.

It really didn’t take much effort to find new alternatives to the old ideas. a few sites I found useful were:

Fundraising Ideas

Easy Fundraising Ideas

Fundraiser Insight

Fundraising Web – what I liked about this site is I was able to select my state to find fundraising businesses close to home cutting down on the fuel it would take to get the product from the business to the school.

I would like to see our school put together a page for all parents to vote on which fundraisers they would be most likely participate in the following year to maximize cash flow and volunteer support. Good Luck in your own fund-raising efforts and I hope this helped. Maybe I will feel more welcome/enthusiastic next year to pay the dues to be on the PTA and make a difference but for now this is all I had to say. Thanks for reading.

In a constant effort to preserve the format and present a printer with the pertinent information my visitors are seeking, I researched a method to clean up the page and remove the linking, header, images and footer information the web browser would typically display and print if given the chance. This print out would result in needless additional ink used ,an over crowded page and diminished topic information that I am on that page to print. Instead I have created a new page that uses it’s own CSS document while still referencing my original information via a script using ASP and Javascript dynamically changing the way I print.

Step 1 the HTML

1. To begin, you must have an HTML page preferably already formatted with CSS, but it is not crucial. I placed the following script in between the <head> </head> tags.

<script language=”JavaScript”>
function PrintThisPage()
{
var sOption=”toolbar=yes,location=no,directories=yes,menubar=yes,”;
sOption+=”scrollbars=yes,width=750,height=650,left=100,top=25″;
var winprint=window.open(“/print.asp”,”Print”,sOption);
winprint.focus();
}
</script>

The above script opens a new window. The following properties of this new window are scalable to fit your preferences.

toolbar=yes or no (displays your browsers toolbar)
location=no or yes (displays the url of the print.asp page being referenced)
directories=yes or no (displays your browsers directory information)
menubar=yes or no (displays your browsers directory information)
scrollbars=yes or no (if your document is long this is preferred)
(the remaining parameters display the size of the window you are opening)
width=750
height=600
left=100
top=25

The remaining text is placed tags of your site.

2. Place the <div> tags below around the important information on your website visitors would like to print.

Your website content

</div>

3. Then place the following JavaScript text linking to the new clean page I am opening.

PrintThisPage();” >Printer Friendly Version

Step 2 the ASP

1. Create a blank document in your web design software or text editor named print.asp

2. Into the print.asp document place the following script and content. This is a bare minimum to make this page run properly. This page will have no structure other than the content you wish to reference. If you have no CSS formatting your task is complete and the parent HTML document you modified above should access the print.asp document below with no trouble.

<html>

<head>

<script language=JavaScript>
function GetPrintContent()
{
var PrintDiv = document.getElementById(‘printcontent’);
var ContentDiv = window.opener.document.getElementById(‘contentstart’);
PrintDiv.innerHTML = ContentDiv.innerHTML;
}
</script>

<body onload=”GetPrintContent();”>

</body>

</html>

Step 3 the CSS

1. To include formatting into the equation utilizing an already established CSS page open your myformat.css document and make a duplicate by selecting File>Save As and naming the document print.css. In this print.css document delete all #id tags not referenced between the

in your primary HTML document in Step 1.

2. Change all background colors or shading to #ffffff (white) and all text colors to #000000 (black)

3. Place the reference link below to your new print.css between the of your print.asp

<link type=”text/css” rel=”stylesheet” href=”print.css”/>

You should now see the same formatting from you website in the new window.

Bonus Step 4 Print this Page

If you removed access to the browser toolbars and such you may want to add a Print this Page image button to you print.asp document. Copy the following between the <body></body> either above or below or the <div id=printcontent> </div> tags.

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE=”JavaScript”>
<!– Begin
if (window.print) {
document.write(‘<form> ‘
+ ‘<input type=”image” src=”images/print-button.gif” name=print value=”Print” ‘
+ ‘onClick=”javascript:window.print()”> </form>’);
}
// End –>
</script>

Now to View All of these scripts together as one unit visit Alpha Center for Divorce Mediation’s article Talking with Children about Divorce.

I recently had to troubleshoot an issue I had with implementing an ASP scripted 301 redirect and want to spread the word how I accomplished this. Working with several ASP 301 redirect codes shared by techs and found searching the web only one of them worked for me on the Windows server I was using.

One tech suggested I create a default.asp in any old text application and paste in the code below.

<% Response.Status = “301 Moved Permanently” Response.AddHeader “Location”, “https://www.yourdomain.com/” Response.End %>

The obvious main problem (to coders that is) with this was it creates a loop back to the default home page document on your server. Based on the hierarchy your servers home page default.asp ranks higher than an index.html, and an index.html outranks a default.aspx file. Unfortunately even after I added the /index.html to this url I still couldn’t get the script to work so I went searching again.

Another tech sent me this next code and suggested that I again create a default.asp in a text edit program and paste the code below but also create a new folder, name it something like redirect, within my root website (/htdocs) and save the default.asp there. Unfortunately because I want to redirect my home page and not an individual page I would have to nest my entire within the new folder potentially loosing long established indexed search engine pages because all of my sites pages would now be located at https://www.yourdomain.com/redirect/sameoldfiles.html. Oh and search engines do not look to kindly on duplicate pages under the same url just in case you were thinking of leaving your old pages where they are and just copying all of the pages on your entire site into the /redirect/ folder. Again I can see this working for individual pages or moving entire subfolders but not changing the Home Page of your site from a non secure to a secure (SSL) page.

<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%
Response.Status=”301 Moved Permanently”
Response.AddHeader “Location”,”http://yourdomain.org/redirectedfoldername/”
%>

After searching and searching I finally came across the following code. For the Network Soultions Windows Server (unlimited) I was using to read an .asp script doocument there was just a small additional text than the 2 above but it didn’t work without it.

<%@ Language=VBScript %>
<%
‘ Permanent redirection
Response.Status = “301 Moved Permanently”
Response.AddHeader “Location”, “https://www.yourdomain.com/index.html”
Response.End
%>

In order to create a clean ‘pure’ page (because it didn’t work by creating a TextEdit .rtf doc on my Mac) I also had to create a “New Page” on my hosts web-based FTP (on Network Solutions host it is called “File Manager”.) Working cross-platform from Mac to Windows can be a struggle at times due to the fact that Mac OS X attaches invisible lines of code that once uploaded to a Windows machine become visible and interfere with the code you are playing with. If you have the Mac Classic OS (9.4 or earlier) use SimpleText to bypass this erroneous code invisible. This was the only way I could successfully perform the search engine friendly 301 redirect converting the home page of my website from a HTTP to an HTTPS.

This can also be checked to confirm success if the redirect is Search Engine Friendly.

Search Engine Friendly Redirect Checker

I also checked the server headers to confirm that my 301 code was running as a 301 Permanant redirect and not a 302 Temporary redirect.

Check Server Headers Tool – HTTP Status Codes Checker

If you are running a 301 redirect in another script visit the link below for the codes. I was able to run the coldfusion redirect I found on this site but unfortunately it wasn’t a help when it came to my home page redirection due to the hierarchy issue I mentioned earlier.

301 Redirect – How to create Redirects

I also found the information on the following page useful for explaining the ins and outs of how Search Engines and how their Spiders see your site

301 Redirects: Only One Home Page Please

Good Luck an Happy New Year!