Raising Awareness of PPHN

When my son was born, he suffered from a rare but life-threatening disease called Persistent Pulmonary Hypertension of the Newborn (PPHN). He was three days old before it looked like he was going to pull through, and he was in the hospital for almost two and half weeks before I was able to bring him home.

During his time in hospital, it was very frustrating for me to try and explain what was wrong with him to other people, because I didn't understand it very well myself, and there was so little in the way of useful information available on the Internet, which really surprised me. No one had heard of PPHN and they didn't really understand how sick my son really was.

I finally decided that I needed to put some resources together to help other parents coping with the same illness, so I wrote an article and recently put together a Squidoo lens where others can also add resources that they know of. Hopefully, these sources will make it that tiny bit easier for parents with newborns suffering from PPHN to understand what is happening to their babies.

Fighting the February Blahs...

Ugh... it's February, pretty much my least favourite month. You'd think that, it being the shortest and all, it wouldn't be so bad, but even though it's short it just seems so long. Maybe it's because I live in a part of the world where winter tends to be long, cold and snowy -- by the time February rolls around, I've been blanketed in snow and sub-zero weather for over three months, and I know there's still another month to go before the thaw in March! :-(

And to top it all off, it is cold and flu season and the whole family is currently ill. Makes it hard to concentrate on getting any real work done when all your energy is focused on getting everyone better and trying to get some rest yourself.

So, that's my excuse for why there haven't been any new things added to the stores recently, aside from some new chipmunk and squirrel keychains that I added to the Zazzle store a couple of weeks ago. Oh, and I did publish a few more items on AC -- two poems (Behind This Mask and Words) and an article on How to Make Your Own Baby Food.

Hopefully everyone will be healthy again soon and I can start working on some new design ideas for the CP store!

Published at last!

Woo-hoo! Associated Content finally published my articles! It took a week, but they're up! I'm all excited to have discovered this online writing outlet, and hope to be a regular contributor to their site. Check out the new articles:

Confessions of a Wanna-Be Stay-At-Home-Mother
How to Apply for Canadian Federal Government Jobs

If you get a chance, leave me some feedback at the bottom of the articles and let me know what you think!

New products in Zazzle store

Well, finally got around to adding some shoe designs to the Zazzle store. I'm quite happy with the way they turned out... they're really kind of cool. Will definitely be adding some more in the near future. Also in the works are some new keychains and stickers for the Zazzle store, and a new section for the CP store. Plus, I've noticed a few broken images in the CP site, so have to fix those up, too. Hopefully all of that will get done this week.

Also hoping that my AC articles will get published in the next day or two. On this week's to do list is another article to write for AC, and some new items for the Etsy store, as well. It's going to be a busy week!

On a side note, I think I may be getting addicted to Facebook. I may have to institute some sort of system whereby I have to work for an hour, or get a particular thing done, and then I can spend 10 minutes playing on facebook, otherwise I'm just going to waste way too much time!