Resources

Places we go, people we see… this page is devoted to some of our favorite or most useful links, which are grouped by topic.

Adoption

• 5 Tips for Writing a Dear Birthmother Letter: Adoptive Families Magazine, 2002.
• 10 Things Your Adoption Agency Won’t Tell You: A cynical, but nonetheless important, article about some of the financial pitfalls in adoption.
• The Agency Feedback List at the Adoption.com Forums: Each member of the forums can post a message including the name of their agency, attorney, or facilitator. Prospective adoptive parents can send these people private messages, asking for their opinion and experience.
• AA Domestic Adoption: Yahoo! group to discuss African-American and bi-racial domestic adoption (foster to adopt or private adoption).
• ABC Adoptions: A clearinghouse of information, including forums and situations.
• Adopting.com: An immense amount of information. Don’t try reading it all at once.
• The Adoption Guide: A resource by Adoptive Families magazine, this site is a good starting point for those considering adoption.
• Adoptive Families Magazine: The magazine for all adoptive parents, from thinking about adoption to the teenage years.
• American Association of Open Adoption Agencies: Some great publications about open adoption for all members of the adoption triad.
• BirthMom Buds: An organization that provides peer counseling, mentoring, friendship, and support for women who are considering placing or have placed their children for adoption.
• Digital Scrapbook Kits: Adoption-related digital scrapbooking kits.
• Ethica: An independent voice for ethical adoption.
• Family Helper: A Canadian site dedicated to providing basic resources about adoption, infertility, and family building.
• Forums at Adoption.com: An amazing collection of information. A must for any adoptive, expectant, or birth parent.
• Many Hearts, One Beat: A site featuring unique gifts for members of the adoption triad, including beautiful jewelry.
• The Myth of the Forever Family: Brain, Child, Dawn Friedman, 2010.
• Open Adoption Support: A site dedicated to supporting and educating those in open adoptions.
• Open Adoption, Broken Heart: Salon, Dawn Friedman, March 8, 2006.
• PACT: An organization that facilitates and supports adoptions of children of color.
• PEAR: Parents for Ethical Adoption Reform.
• Reaching Out: This site is by the author of the only book that tells prospective adoptive parents how to write the “Dear Birthmother Letter.”
• Scrap and Tell: Adoption-related scrapbooking supplies.
• Tapestry Books: The largest selection of adoption-related literature.
• Transracial Adoption or Placement: Yahoo! group to discuss adopting transracially, regardless of initial location of the child.

Being Green

• Bringing Back the Natives: An annual tour of gardens that use plants native to California.
• Care2: An environmental and socially conscious super site.
• Earth 911: A great resource for recycling items.
• Freecycle: Offer your usable but unwanted items. Ask for stuff you need. Give stuff to others. All for free!
• gDiapers: An excellent alternative to disposables and cloth.
• The Green Guide: The complete guide to green living.
• LocalHarvest: Find farms and farmers’ markets near you.
• Moms Rising: A site that intends to harness the power of mothers who want to make this world better for their children.
• My Footprint: Calculate how much you personally mess up the environment.
• Vegetarian Shoes: Lovely shoes for those of us who don’t wear animals.
• We Are What We Do: A site to inspire people to change the world with their everyday actions.
• Worm Lady: You too can own worms who help compost your organic waste (called vermicomposting).

Favorites

• The Academy Awards: Robyn’s favorite television event of the year, even if she hasn’t seen the movies.
• Alton Brown: We tell Jack he’s the funny food guy. He’s really quite amazing! (Jack and Alton both are, actually.)
• Disney Parks: Some of our favorite places on Earth.
• FireFly Wiki: Firefly is a favorite of both Robyn and Max. Robyn wants another movie!
• Harrison Ford: A Web Guide to the Films: How much does Robyn love Harrison Ford? Max wouldn’t let Robyn consider the name “Harrison” for our child.
• Muggle Net: An authoritative fan site devoted to Harry Potter.
• Scarlett Online: A beautiful web site devoted to the best movie ever made.
• The Tufts Beelzebubs: An amazing all-male college a cappella group.

Friends

• Alex Benton: Robyn’s former roommate.
• Audrey Paige Dickinson Surdyk: Daughter of College Park High School alum Kari Dickinson.
• Big Wide Logic: John Biggs, CMU, Scotch n Soda alum.
• DJ Champ: Robyn’s brother-in-law Jim Rose.
• foodstuff: Blog by Deanna.
• Fortier Fotography: Greg Fortier, New Hampshire friend and photographer.
• From Our Bunch to Yours: Robyn’s online friend Lori describes her family’s life. Lori has adopted from Haiti and is active in missionary work.
• Krista Contino Krahn: CMU No Parking Players alum.
• Lisa Marinacci: CMU, BHA, Scotch n Soda alum.
• Sharona Jacobs Photography: CMU alum
• Will Uther: CMU No Parking Players alum.

Hobbies

• Actorsingers: Community theatre company in NH, with which Robyn was involved.
• Etsy: The craft world’s alternative to Ebay.
• Nashua Theatre Guild: Community theatre company in NH, with which Robyn and Max were initmately involved.

Multicultural Resources

• Love Isn’t Enough: For parents committed to raising children with an anti-racist outlook.
• Black Books Galore!: An independent children’s book store, offering a range of carefully selected, marvelous books for black and multicultural children.
• Dolls Like Me: Multicultural dolls, puppets, toys, and games.
• SleepySoft, Dolls and Toys for Adopted Children: This site boasts the best selection of multicultural dolls on or off the Internet.
• Totally Tots, African-American Dolls and Books: A growing selection of African-American dolls and African-American themed books. You’ll find African-American dolls for boys, girls, babies, and toddlers, as well as books written for, by, and about African-Americans.

Parent and Child

• 100% Lactose Free Entertainment: Information about being lactose-intolerant (or allergic to cow’s milk protein, which is often just called being lactose intolerant).
• Adventures in Babywearing: Blog articles by a concerned mom, who believes that her son’s epilepsy is a direct result of vaccinations. Vaccine-specific posts include my favorite, Stirring the Pot: What I Want Every Parent to Know.
• Baby Cheapskate: A blog that keeps track of sales and discounts on children’s stuff.
• Baby Loves Music: An innovative, fun series of books that introduce children to different types of music.
• Bottle Raid 2007: Blog entry about the hazards of bisphenol-A (BPA) including lists of BPA-containing and BPA-free products.
• Fluoride Action Network: Site that explains why fluoride isn’t necessarily as good as we’ve been led to believe.
• gDiapers: Yahoo! group that discusses the wonderful diaper alternative, gDiapers, as well as other green parenting topics.
• Healthy Child, Healthy World: This site offers information and advice for living an environmentally-friendly home life.
• Holistic Pediatric Association: Information about alternatives to conventional medicine.
• I.C.P.A, International Chiropractic Pediatric Association: Information about chiropractic care as a “foundation of wellness.”
• iPride : An organization that supports multiracial families.
• Mandy’s Moon: Excellent personalized stationery, including address labels, and gifts for adoptive or multicultural families.
• Milestone Charts at BabyCenter : One set of milestone charts from birth to age 3.
• SafeMama: A blog that is a child safety, product recall, health and well-being resource for parents.
• Signing Time!: Teaching infants to sign means that they learn to communicate earlier, reducing frustration for all parties.
• zRecommends: Excellent blog with eco-friendly children’s product reviews! Check out the ZRecs Guide to Safer Children’s Products.

Useful Tools

• Dotti’s Weight Loss Zone: An amazing collection of diet-related information, including the Weight Watchers POINTS values of a dizzying array of foods.
• Real Simple: The bible of organized living.
• TinyURL: This site makes long URLs shorter, so they don’t wrap around in email messages.
• The Ultimate White Pages: Search several directory sites simultaneously.
• Verse It: Lots of ideas for writing invitations of all sorts.
• Weather Underground: Weather information from all over the world, including archives that can tell you what the weather was years ago.

Vaccination

• WAVE, World Association for Vaccine Education: Probably the best site I’ve come across. A comprehensive, professional site that includes a well-written blog, excellent listing and explanations of vaccines and their ingredients , and a wealth of related information.
• National Vaccine Information Center: The NVIC was crucial in starting the vaccination debate. This site is dated, but there is good information hiding in it. Some pages worth reading include In the Wake of Vaccines and Vaccine Myths and Facts. Otherwise, each link takes you to a list of articles and other links related to specific vaccines and diseases.
• A User-Friendly Vaccination Schedule  and An Update on This Vaccination Schedule: Dr. Donald W. Miller, Jr., the article that solidified our resolve to delay vaccinating Jack.
• Are Vaccines a Waste of Time?: London Evening Standard, excerpt from the book The Truth About Vaccines, by Richard Halvorsen
• Australian Vaccination Network: Still under construction, this site will have brief information about each disease for which there is a vaccination.
• Chalkboard Campaign: Vaccine awareness.
• Do Vaccines Damage the Immune System?: Article by Dr. Randall Neustaedter
• Dr. Tenpenny on Vaccines: Blog by Dr. Sherri Tenpenney, “one of the country’s most outspoken physicians regarding the impact of vaccines on health.”
• Healthful Living, Vaccinations: Article discusses vaccines and their possible relationship to autism and other neurological disorders.
• History of Vaccines: A brief list of historical information. Please note that the rest of the site is extremely biased, even among anti-vax sites, and is an example of why people who oppose vaccinations are often called insane.
• I.C.P.A, International Chiropractic Pediatric Association, Childhood Articles: A list of articles about various pediatric health issues, including Vaccinations: The Choice of a Lifetime: (Dr. Larry Palvesky, May/June 2003), Challenging the Theory of Artificial Immunity (Keith Wassung), and Chicken Pox Vaccine (Jim Davis, January/February 2003).
• Informed Choice, Vaccine Ingredients: Lists the ingredients in common vaccines. One of my most-cited sites.
• The Informed Parent: A UK-based group that supports making informed decisions.
• K.N.O.W. Vaccines: Overview of the current immunization schedule, ingredients, common reactions, and more.
• MotheringDotCommune Vaccinations Forum: Mothering Magazine’s web forum for learning more about vaccinations, not vaccinating, or vaccinating according to a selective or delayed schedule. The Vaccinations forum is heavily anti-vax, while cooler heads tend to prevail on the Selective and Delayed Vaccinations forum.
• New Yorkers for Vaccination Information and Choice: Excellent site with clear articles and information about the downsides of the vaccines. Great information about the chicken pox vaccination and shingles.
• Package Inserts at the Institute for Vaccine Safety: Each vaccine comes with a package insert, a “manual” about what is in the vaccine, what it does, what the common reactions are, and so on. These are extremely enlightening! Find out what’s in the vaccines your child is supposed to have. This page covers US-licensed vaccines only.
• Put Children First: Site devoted to the link between vaccines and autism. Includes interviews and articles. This site is related to Generation Rescue.
• quaintpassion, Vaccination: August 25, 2005, Personal blog entry about one family’s decision to delay vaccinations. Includes hundreds of links to all sorts of vaccine-related information. Only go here if you  have a lot of time on your hands! You will not find a more comprehensive list of links.
• Raising a Vaccine-Free Child: Excerpts from the book by Wendy Lydall.
• Think Twice Global Vaccine Institute: Heavily anti-vax, and heavy on the conspiracy theories. Does contain some good Q&A’s and information about homeopathic alternatives to vaccines.
• Vaccinations: Yahoo! group that discusses vaccination-related issues. Heavily anti-vax! Articles are posted daily.
• “Vaccine Toxicity and Safety of Vaccinations: A Parent’s Right to Choose” (Jane Sheppard, July 18, 2004)
• Vaccination Information and Choice Network: Lots of links to articles, studies, historical information – practically everything. Each disease and/or vaccine has its own section, as do some of the reactions. The owner of this site is a nurse who also offers classes on vaccine dangers and how to prevent and treat disease holistically. Heavily anti-vax!
• Vaccination Liberation: Lots and lots of links! This site is very difficult to navigate. Some of the more useful information includes…
• Vaccinations, Parents Informed Choice: (The Weston A. Price Foundation, Lynne Borne, November 7, 2005) A great, though dated, basic article that argues for informed decisions regarding vaccination. Many of the reasons this writer cites are the reasons why we do not vaccinate Jackson.
• Vaccinations at Health World Online: This site is devoted to alternative medicine, so it is no surprise that the articles here are against current vaccination practices. The articles are dated, but some are very informative nonetheless: About Vaccine Choices (Excerpts from The Vaccine Guide: Making an Informed Choice, by Randall Neustaedter), Unvaccinated Children (Richard Moskowitz, MD), Vaccination and Social Violence (Harris L. Coulter PhD, 1996), SIDS and Seizures (Harris L. Coulter PhD, 1996).
• Vaccine Refusal and Medical Intimidation: A personal account of one family’s visit to their pediatrician, this article includes excellent advice about what to do if your pediatrician wants you to sign a “refusal to vaccinate form” and offers alternatives. Summary: Don’t sign the form! This account also links to a basic article about vaccine choice, Dispelling Vaccination Myths (Alan Phillips, May 2001).
• Vaccine Rights: Vaccination injury attorney site, that includes an extensive legal FAQ. Another brief article also addresses the forms, Refusal to Vaccinate Forms Raise Ethical Questions (Alan Phillips, December 2007, PDF). Vaccine Exemption Alliance is another vaccination-rights law firm.
• Vaccination Risk Awareness Network: A collection of links, articles, and information about vaccines, disease, and vaccine reactions.
• Vaccination.co.uk: A site under construction by a British chiropractor and father. There is quite a bit of medical information here about the immune system and how it works. This man wrote a dissertation on the DTP vaccine.
• Vegan Family Anti-Vaccine Information: A brief collection of interesting articles and a recommended reading list.
• Vaccine Debate: Personal web site of a vaccine opponent and author. Good for basic information, though not all sources are listed. A good introduction to the arguments against vaccines.
• Vaccination Dilemma: A basic site that introduces the concept of refusing vaccines.
• WIC and Vaccines: A discussion about the Women, Infants, Children program, as it pertains to vaccinations. In summary, you can choose not to vax, or to vax selectively, and remain on WIC.