It turns out that, contrary to what the doctors tell you, SIDS can be 100% prevented with the use of a mattress cover. So, we put such a cover on our son’s mattress, and now we put him to sleep on his tummy. Suddenly, he sleeps for six hours at a time! Nights haven’t been this good in the last 4 months. Booyah!

So, we did a little more research. There’s a pretty strange book available about the SIDS epidemic that claims that SIDS is caused by heavier-than-air toxic gasses caused by (get this) fungus that eats the fire-retardant chemicals we put on our baby mattresses. Bizarre, right? But the mattress cover thing works 100% (studies have been done), so we’re running with it even if the theory behind it sounds crackery. If we’re the first to fail, we’ll let you know. In the meantime, we’ll enjoy our sleep.

WID2MMO:
I’ve just put out a free e-report that discusses exactly where (and who) we went wrong with our dietary knowledge. It’s the first chapter of How to Eat Food with a little bit of rewriting and some links back to the H2EF sales page. It’s up on Scribd and several other Ebook directories as well as a few forums. I’m hoping it’ll "go viral" and bring some people back to the sales page.

All of my efforts to make money thorough internet marketing are not working as quickly as I would like.   Due to some really lame laws and rules at Clickbank.com, I’ve made more than $200 there, but I can’t get the check until I sell to 5 different credit cards — and most of my purchases have been through PayPal, which doesn’t count.  GAY!

As a result, unless my tax return comes through with miraculous speed, I may not have an apartment come February 11th.  :(   My unemployment has run out, so I’m pretty much screwed after the tax return runs out.  Suffice to say, I’m looking for all kinds of work at this point, I don’t even care what.

In the meantime, WID2MMO:

I’ve created a small e-report excerpted from my main book, and I’m putting it up on Scribd (

Wish me luck!

OK, so it’s been like two or three months since I’ve been able to post, because of a lot of things that I won’t go into a lot of detail on.  Suffice to say, it involves cancer, unemployment, babies, a liquid lunch, two rubber bands, and a particle accelerator.  (6 points if you get that one without Googling it.)

Anyway, I’m going to start a new thing: the What I’m Doing to Make Money Online Blog.  It’s going to be right here, as part of my normal posting thing.  So, I’ll do a normal post like I do, and then I’ll add a little “WID2MMO” section at the bottom. I figure it’ll be a good thing for people to get an idea of how I spend the few hours that I don’t spend cooking, cleaning, changing diapers, and keeping my wife from going stark raving crazy — by gaming with her.

So, here’s my brief rant for the day: diapers.  Disposable diapers are disgusting.  They don’t absorb poop, which means that poop gets all over the baby — and they don’t have tight enough elastic around the waist, so if your baby spends a lot of time on his back (like most do), you’ll end up with poop on the back of the baby’s head.  That’s gross.

Furthermore, there’s no laws about what chemicals are allowed in disposable diapers, so you have no control about what kinds of estrogen mimics and other awful things your disposable diapers are off-gassing and otherwise leaking int0 your baby’s personal space.  Cloth diapers, you control how they’re washed, and that’s that.  I am a big fan of that kind of control.

WID2MMO:

I’ve just ported How to Eat Food over to a new website, created a Squidoo page for it, and gotten it put up on the Clickbank Marketplace.  Hopefully, I’ll have a brilliant idea for driving a bunch of affiliates to start selling it.   On the From the Inside tip, I just finished reviewing a new product (Child Custody Strategies 2009),  and I’m making backlinks to it as per Angela From Aberdeen’s advice.

I was informed of a much more successful, if less rewarding, way to pay my rent by “working” from home, and I’m trying it out.  My Ebook is stalled, and while I have some good ideas about how to semi-start-over and do it right, I need that money to start coming in yesterday.  So, I’ve put together a product-review site called From the Inside which will pay my rent for the next few years while I set up some further income-making potential.

In baby news, Giovanni is the cutest creature on the entire planet (proof avaiable here) and also already smarter than a pigeon, despite the Japanese scientist who claims otherwise (Google “pigeon smarter 3″ to learn what I’m talking about).

Finally, in science news, we know what causes SIDS, and we’ve known for a long time.  We just don’t believe what we know.  Google “BabeSafe” and “The Infant Survival Guide”.  The answer is bizarre, and simpler to deal with than you think.

So I have the cutest baby boy evar.  EVAR.  Or, in The Daily Show tradition, the “Cutest &^%@king Baby…EVER”.

Born August 30th, 2008 at 11:37 AM, Giovanni Omanand Danielson was 8 pounds 15 ounces, and a mighty 21′ tall.  He’s O-positive, for you Japanese types who enthuse about that kind of thing (odd, since I’m A+ and my wife is A-), and he loves Maj’s breasts almost as much as I do.

Future ruler of the world!

I have to say, I was unprepared, emotionally, for this event.  Everyone told me that ‘everything changes’, but I I don’t think I had the slightest clue what they meant.  It’s so strange, being afraid the phone might ring for fear of waking the adoraboly sleeping creature you just put to bed.  That, and wanting to play with the baby 24/7 in favor of Final Fantasy Tactics, blogging, or any of the activities that used to take up my time.  Sigh.

I promise to keep a better pace than I have recently.  Now that the baby is here and my wife isn’t entirely incapacitatedly gravid, it should be easier.

Fear, World!  Giovanni Omanand Danielson is BORN!

So humans have been having babies for thousands of years, but if you listen to all of the mothers out there who want to tell you their horror stories, you might be wondering how.   The answer, as far as we can tell, is that labor isn’t as bad as it’s made out to be if you’re a healthy human female.

My wife is one of those, and she’s in labor right now.  She’s chilling on her computer playing Civilization IV (she’s always Egypt).  I have to ask her if she’s having contractions still – once she got used to them, it was ho-hum.  The advice we got from the birth classes would have us in the hospital by now, but seriously, why lock ourselves into a tiny room with people stressing her out with tests and stuff?  Babies happen without that kind of interference every day all over the world, and ours can do it, too.

Now, we’ve been ready for weeks — bags packed, snacks prepared, call lists made, etc.  The baby’s room is almost perfect, and we have everything a parent could possibly need except a nursing bra.  But with everything all ready, the early stages of labor is almost boring.  That’s a good thing, in case you couldn’t tell.

Just more proof that being healthy – really healthy — makes life better in every way.

Now, I’m not a father yet, so this may be a bit premature. Forgive me, but I’ve been having lots of long discussions with nurses, mothers, nutritionists, and at least one person who’s been all three (my mother-in-law), and I feel the building need to write this.

In Part 1 of this series, I talked about how important nutrition and not stressing is to babies in the womb. Well, consider infancy the “fourth trimester”. Here’s why: formula-fed babies are universally not as healthy as breast-fed babies (as adults as well as children!) Breast-fed babies get the same nutrition, antibodies, some ingested chemicals, and some hormones as the mothers. Literally, until your baby is on solid food, he is what you eat, Mom.

The chemicals to avoid are a very long list, but the hardest ones to get away from in my experience are BHA, BHT, anything that ends in “paraben” (found in most beauty products these days, including almost every hand lotion on the planet), and the plasticizer that leaks from any plastic stamped “3″ and “7″. Really, continuing to follow the dietary advice given in the rest of this blog should be mandatory. Also, of course, no alcohol, nicotine, or drugs (prescription or otherwise unless they’re strictly necessary for your survival).

Equally critical to a child’s health is avoiding vaccines. Yes, I said avoiding vaccines. Lots of research exists to indicate that most autism, developmental disorders, dyslexia, social ineptitude, and low-IQ syndromes have their basis in an encephalitic reaction to aluminum and/or mercury in vaccines given to infants. Babies who were malnourished in utero are more susceptible to this reaction, but all infants are at risk. By far, the best policy in terms of raising an intelligent, socially-capable baby is to feed your child right for a few years, and get any necessary vaccines just before they are necessary to get the child into school. Even then, discuss with your doctor a way to maximize the amount of time between vaccine shots — because getting multiple shots in a narrow time frame greatly increases the chance of an encephalitic reaction.

But all of that is the lessimportant part. By far the more important part is the attitude and actions you take as a parent regarding your child.

As with any major life event, people almost universally fail to acknowledge that they can decide how to react to a baby. The simple fact is that 90% of your ability to cope with anything is your response to it, and that response is controllable. It’s hard to do, but it can be done. It is critical to your baby’s long-term health and well-being that you view the baby as a goal and a dream in and of iteself, and not an obsticle to your other goals and dreams.

The best attitude to have toward the baby is that you and your baby are on the same team. Your baby has goals from day one: figure out what the world is, and how to get what it wants from the world. A baby that has helpful supervision and just as importantly, an excited partner in this quest learns early that the world is a playground filled with allies. A baby that has to fight its parents as well as its lack of dexterity and understanding in order to learn about the world is going to grow up understanding the world as an obstacle course filled with enemies.

Equaly important is the understanding that you are responsible for your baby every second of it’s life. That responsibility started the instant you knew you were going to have a baby, and it will continue until one of you dies. As an infant, that means that you have to ensure that you have eyes and/or ears on your child 24/7 until it is able to fend for itself. This doesn’t mean you can’t select proxy caretakers – that’s a necessary part of parenthood – but it does mean that you have to take measures to make sure that someone always knows the status of your baby.

Finally, part of humanity is sociality. Babys, from the moment they are capable of holding their head up and looking around, look for people — and they use the information they gather to build a set of rules of what to expect of the world. If you teach them early that the world is full of people that smile and wave, they will learn to smile and wave back. If you teach them early that the world is full of people who stay their distance and don’t interact — or worse yet, that it’s not full of people at all — the baby will learn to cry, retreat, and not deal with strangers. So take your infant to places like the library, where it’s quiet enough not to alarm them, but plenty of people of all shapes and sizes will come up and wave and smile.

By giving the baby the right building blocks for a solid body and brain, avoiding toxins that can damage them, providing constant support for their quest to learn, and giving them an accurate view of what the world really is like, your infant will develop rapidly, learn to be a social, outgoing toddler, and be well on its way to a long, healthy adult life.

It’s called a baby.

No, just kidding. Tyke-prep has taken up so much of my time that the only time I can ever spend online is when my wife is asleep and I can sneak away. Fortunately, she sleeps a lot.

The real new project is a companion-site to my ebook, also called How to Eat Food. It’s a collection of everything that I have written/will write about nutrition (except the book itself, of course), all designed to nudge people toward the book while providing some seriously excellent information about nutrition.

So, baby prep and terapad, and more baby prep. That’s my life at the moment. I promise more thought-provokingness once the baby is alive and we’re not moving every single item in our apartment from one place to another to make ready for him.

Peace!

After weeks of focused effort, with huge support from my friends at the 30 Day Challenge, my first ever information product is up and running! I’m sorry to have neglected all of you who have asked me what happened to my blog — it’s still going to be attended to, fear not.

But between everything that’s happening, with the baby on the way, the electric bill hovering near $200 (and due August 1st), and my effort to get this Ebook for sale to the public in a deperate attempt to pay my bills, it’s been…a long time.

It’s probably going to be another while, because the next project is a massive garage sale, for which we have to go through everything in the house in the next week, cleaning, pricing, and prepping. But I haven’t forgotten all of you! I shall return!

Until then, those of you who want to check out my masterpiece…still have to buy it. (Sorry!)

You can do so right here.

Thank you, everyone, for your patience and your support. I love you all.

Michael “Essence” Danielson

Back in a few days…

So I posted a thread on the Thirty Day Challenge forums, basically asking for people to help me put together a product and an internet marketing campaign to help me raise $400 by July 15th so I can keep my lights on. The people of the Challenge came back to me with some amazing advice, encouragement, help in my quest to set up a product, and — much to my heart-stopping amazement — offers of direct assistance. A few of you called my church on my behalf, I recieved a check in the mail, and some of you used the donation link I put up on this page to offer me your help.

In the last 48 hours, between friends, family, and the 30 Day Challenge folks, I have $310 of that $400, my product half complete with some excellent ideas on how to market it, and some products to give away as bonuses to encourage people to partake of my knowledge. I believed in my heart that I could make $400 in two weeks — with only $90 to go, I feel like failure isn’t even a possibility.

God bless every single one of you that has helped me through this.

In particular:
Jr30dc and Mfishgrab — I think you and I will be in touch for a long time to come. You stun me.
Richardjes — I think those PLRs you offered will be a huge help. Thank you!
OnthemarkFB — your advice probably saved me ten days of crushing despair, and no one offered as
much time and expertise as you have. You rock.
MurMurMeAndrew — Your ideas were excellent, and I hugely appreciated the thoughts.
Chap1 and IMStrong — You two kind-hearted people really got me in the gratitude frame of mind.
Bless you both.
David Alliet — Can’t believe I didn’t pimp you out on the first go-round. You’re the shit.
Guys, check out David’s awesome photographic ninja skillz. He’s the best Belgian I’ve ever had sleep in my living room.

OK, back to work.

As OnthemarkFB said: Let’s get things fired up!!