Cord, Leaks, Pacifiers and Vaccinations

Eli's umbilical cord fell off today. Yea, now I get to give him a real bath. Silas is excited about this, too. He doesn't care too much for the sponge baths Eli's been getting.

We've also been having a lot of trouble with Eli's diapers leaking. It doesn't matter what brand we use, at some point he leaks in them. There are two times he usually leaks: Right after we've put a fresh diaper on him or when we put him down for his nap while he's still awake. I don't know how he does it, but it's pretty consistent that if we've decided to put him in his crib to let him learn to fall asleep on his own (which means letting him cry for a few minutes), he ends up leaking. I've already been contemplating switching to cloth diapers, and the exasperation from having to put a fresh diaper on him when the previous one was barely used just gives me one more reason. We'll see if I'm brave enough.

We've also been trying to get Eli to use a pacifier. With Silas, we couldn't get him to use one because he had a hard time switching from a pacifier to the breast. He ended up learning how to suck his thumb to pacify himself until his next feeding. I would much rather have Eli use a pacifier than suck his thumb for one reason only: You can always take away a pacifier, but you can't cut the thumb off. But getting him to learn how to use a pacifier is so tricky! He can't keep it in his mouth for longer than 15 seconds on his own.

The last thing Christian and I have been contemplating is vaccinations. Silas has gotten all of his and is due another round on his 4th birthday. Eli has his first round coming up at the 2 month mark. I've always tried to keep up to date with the vaccine-autism correlation, but never felt that there was enough justification not to vaccinate. However, I recently found out something interesting about vaccines. Some of them, including the MMR, chicken pox, and Hepatitis A vaccines, were created using fetal tissue from elective abortions in the 1960s. So if we choose not to vaccinate now, it would be due to the fact that these specific vaccines come from aborted fetal tissue and not because of any correlation to autism (although there hasn't been a study on how using human DNA in vaccines might affect our children). We haven't made our decision and we've got a while before either of the boys will be getting these specific vaccines, but here's a link if you're interested:

http://www.rtl.org/prolife_issues/LifeNotes/VaccinesAbortion_FetalTissue.html

I read a statistic that in Britain 1 in every 64 children has autism, and that it's much more prevalent in boys. We have a lot of research and praying to do about this subject!